The Surreal Imaginarium is basically a crappy tech demo with what looks like a few recycled, uncredited stock assets (who doesn't love the smell of plagiarism in the morning). This is an attempt to make an interactive "art" experience, with pretentious hippy dialled up to 11. Sure, games can be art, BG3, RDR2 are art... art is where craftsmanship and imaginative creativity come together in perfect unison to create something greater than the sum of it's parts. This is some high school dropout computer gaming course D-minus effort that the developer is charging money for.... yeah, 4 bucks for a 10 minute hippy experience.
The technical quality here is on par with the ambition... almost none. You just wave your hands around and do some primitive interactions with a trippy hippy backdrop. In fact the only ambitious thing about this is that someone thought this would be worth money, and put it up for sale on Steam. Don't laugh, it's true, we're here right now.
The game is very very short and can be finished in 10 minutes or so. Developers have at least some responsibility to provide enough content to make a game last more than 2 hours if they're serious about providing something of value to gamers. There's less content here than most free game demos.
The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
This seems to have been made a VR exclusive to prevent any comparison with non-VR 3D games, a comparison that this game would fail very badly at. Developers must learn that while VR is great, if the only thing that makes the game great is the VR, then the game isn't great at all.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
The Surreal Imaginarium has the laughable price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
