Broken Reality

Interesting game, the ending section completely ruins it though

I like the game, absolutely love the art & aesthetic.

Gem of a game with a few endearing Easter eggs, especially if you were involved online in the 2010s. Without going into spoilers, some mechanics, imagery and events show a broader commentary on the state of social media, which some people might not care for, but for me got a lot of giggles and made the game even better. The platforming is creative and there's a good balance between the amount of puzzles and exploration time. Looking forward to Broken Reality 2000 this month!

Devs never patched in an option to simply invert y-axis. It's a common feature in nearly all video games but for the entire life of this game, the devs couldn't be assed to do it. Someone in the community had to share a patch in order to invert y-axis. Can't recommend this or any game the devs make on this merit alone.

big fan of whatever that was

(Originally written in 2019, as one segment of a three part review for YIIK, Hypnospace Outlaw and Broken Reality) Broken Reality plays very differently from Hypnospace Outlaw, but it's about many of the same ideas. Once again you explore a visualization of the early internet. This time not through a browser, but in the form of an actual 3D environment, all low poly, pastel colours, creative user avatars and crystalline dolphins. In other words, something that looks distinctly Vaporwave. Vaporwave, of course, being a very interesting cultural and artistic movement. that I could try to elaborate on, using fancy words like "hauntology", but that'd be time spent not actually talking about the game. Which is why I'd like to keep it brief: Vaporwave is the wistfully nostalgic cousin of Cyberpunk, something that seems inherently contradictory. A type of utopian dystopia. A state of comforting alienation. Zen Capitalism. The great shopping mall in the sky. Or if that's to poetic for you: The future you were looking forward to when you were a kid in the 90s and a teen in the 00s but never came. So, what is it you do in Broken Reality? You explore highly detailed environments that invoke early 3D games, vaporwave art and virtual realities like second live, solve puzzles, engage in some fairly simple platforming, solve quests and uncover some secrets, all in an attempt to earn "Likes". You have a variety of tools, among them the ability to Like things yourself, a credit card to aquire various items, a Katana that slashes through Malware and a grappling hook. There is a variety of environments. You start on a beautiful tropical island where you get most of your items, exploring it in a very Metroidvania-like fashion. You move on to a hubworld, enter a rather seapunk-y underwater temple, a colourful cruise ship and a large city. There are a few tricky puzzles in Broken Reality but those do little to detract from the joy of exploration. Artistically, Broken Reality is a triumph. Every single level feel is absolutely beautiful in an archaic way, creating nostalgic dreamscapes that effortlessly manage to evoke a feeling of sentimental nostalgia in me, and I like to believe I'm usually pretty resistent to that sort of thing. Fairly late in the game you enter an urban level amusingly named "Geocity", a rain soaked metropolis that made me feel homesick for a place I've never been to. That's what's at the center of Broken Reality. Web 1.0 as a type of Paradise Lost in the final stages of its own decay, a place we would all like to return to, but can't. Most of the nameless NPCs are undetailed humanoid meshes staring at their phones while actual activity seems very low with only a few veterans holding on. Broken Reality walks a thin line between comedy and melancholia, despite its longing for an internet that no longer exists, it's filled to the brim with blunt, sometimes downright vulgar, jokes and more or less obscure references. A mission in Geocity asks you to, literally, download a car and a stoned, rastafarian Sonic the Hedgehog fancharacter tells you that you "Gotta go slow". I won't spoil any more jokes but take my word for it when I tell you that there are plenty and a lot of the environmental gags involve some legitimately clever wordplay. It's hard to say what the point of Broken Reality is, exactly, beyond having you explore an interesting environment, having you laugh at its silly dad jokes and having you wallow in nostalgia for what might be the best 3D visualization of Cyberspace ever put to a visual medium. Looking back there is something very poetic to how we used to talk about the internet. It was a mystical place called "Cyperspace" which sounded exciting and ethereal as compared to the crude, materialistic "meatspace". The web was something you used to "surf", like a wave. It was a place where you could escape from reality. Things have changed. Now you can neither escape reality by going on the internet, nor escape the internet by enjoying Real Life. Reality has become blurred. Fractured. You could say... Broken. It's hard to say how much substance there actually is to Broken Reality, thematically and narratively. You do find out quite a bit about its world and what exactly happened to it, though there's no clear resolution to it the way there is in Hypnospace Outlaw. It ends on a pretty trippy note that raises more question than it answers and it does feel like there is a deeper message to the game. What it is, though, I can't tell you. It's open to interpetation. Overall it's my favourite of the three games I wanted to talk about in this thread though I'd hesitate to say that it's objectively a better game than Hypnospace Outlaw. Broken Reality is a more formalist approach to many of the same themes that HO explored. In Hypnospace, the story of its setting was told through its people. In Broken Reality the setting is the story. The remnants of the old Cyberspace as the ruins of a lost civilization. It's a world that's easy to get lost in and Broken Reality is a fairly long game for what's essentially a walking simulator. I'm not sure if you'll find it as compelling as I did but by all means, I think everyone should give it a try.

One section of the game has a math problem (not a hard one). Solved it, but the game refuses to progress & that pretty much stops the game as I cannot progress. For that reason alone, I cannot recommend it as the game is broken. For clarity: X = 8 Y = 5 1. Z = x + y + x & round up if odd (22, this section worked). 2. Offset = x * z (176) 3. Y + offset = 181 (but the game is rejecting that answer). Tried cancelling the rounding, also did not work. On this basis I have decided to refund the game, which is a shame as I liked it up to this point.