Realms of Reverie

I mean for being free, it's not bad. It's a promising demo to a magical VR experience. Unfortunately, performance / optimization was not good. I was getting anywhere from 30-90 fps on my RTX 3080. It was teleport only, with snap turning, so that's pretty out-dated. The game ends rather abruptly and the puzzles were meant for children I think. However, it's free. If these students put more time into this project, it could be rather special. Tested on the Meta Quest 3 using link cable.

"Realms of Reverie" is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. It's from Ringling Collect of Art and Design in Florida. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. The students made a short VR tech demo for their thesis. It's a bit Myst like, you solve a couple of simple puzzles (by waving your hands around just right in VR) and then it's over. The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 10 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download. The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. It's VR exclusive, and that shows the developer failed to understand the most basic axiom of VR game design... if the only cool thing about your product is VR support, your product is not cool. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. It would be unethical for students to try charge money for their homework assignments, so you don't have to pay any money for this. But you'd still have to spend your time downloading this, and "time is money", as they say. There's the other problem, too... as a student project, this wasn't made for gamers. There's no requirement for them to polish and balance the game properly, all they need is something to show the faculty so they can get their grade and move on. Let's once more ask... why is that good for gamers? It's obviously not delivering a solid product. Yet here it is, on the store page, and here you are, reading my review for a student demo that's going to waste your time. While genuine amateur developers who made real products get ignored because they have to compete with this stuff. In some ways, this deluge of student projects on Steam is harmful to everyone. Even as a free product, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 2 users[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to spend time with this. This isn't a complete game for gamers, just a student tech demo, and it offers no profile benefits like +1 to your game collector badge, so I can't recommend adding it to your library.