This Strange Realm Of Mine

This Strange Realm of Mine is a mixed bag. There are a few good horror moments and a bit of interesting dialog. The gameplay is basic, but that's what you expect in a game like this. The real draw of this kind of game is the story and horror moments. Most of the out and out horror is good, and some of it is great. The game's visual design and music is really well done, which is surely part of why its horror works well. Clearly, this game has a lot of effort put in, and that makes it quite charming. However, the story is the real meat of this game, mostly delivered through dialog and poems that appear between levels. I don't want to be harsh on the game's creator, and I'll preface this by saying that I had fun playing the game and reading its dialog and poetry, and I think I got a little something out of the experience. I certainly found some of it very interesting; this game's plot circuits in very interesting topics, and its visual presentation is generally excellent. But, This Strange Realm of Mine's writing is pretty awful. The dialog flips between cheery self-help speak and diatribes on the meaning or nature existence. It's jarring, and what others have praised as existential crisis inducing or a class in philosophy turns out to be a pretty surface level, sophomoric understanding of existentialism, psychoanalysis, and general metaphysics. All its characters are mouthpieces for theories that come across as the writings of a teenager who skimmed an introduction to philosophy and took all the parts they thought sounded good. There's also no way to meaningfully disagree with the game's characters AND be correct (as far as the game is concerned, that is), which is very frustrating when the characters are trying to teach me metaphysics and failing. The poetry that precedes each level has exactly the same issue, on top of being amateur poetry complete with forced rhymes, cliches, and more. What really peeved me about the game's writing the most, however, was its depiction of mental illness. One of the game's levels implies that social anxiety can be cured with a simple change in attitude. This was a damn shame because the way it portrayed social anxiety was genuinely terrifying. There's more like that, made worse by the self-help nonsense and rampant sophistry. Also, the game is very short. That would be fine if it was tight and to the point, but it isn't. The game spends its limited time trying to blow the player's mind and failing. Part of why the life lessons and existential musings fail is because this game does not earn those moments through any plot that exists outside of them. In fact, there really is almost no plot to speak of for most of the game. I don't recommend This Strange Realm of Mine not because I didn't enjoy it at all, but because the psychological and philosophical content was pretty poor, and the overall quality of its writing disappointing, and because it's 10 dollars. That's far too much to play a philosophical game that fails to deliver the majority of its story well. The ending was quite interesting, however.

Birinci şahıs nişancı türünde, piksel, üç boyutlu görsellerin üst üste oturtularak oluşturulduğu grafikleriyle ve oynanışıyla dikkat çeken bir oyun. Psikolojik korku olarak geçse de çok fazla korku öğesi barındırdığı söylenemez. Çizimleri güzel yapılmış. Küçük bulmacalar eklenmiş ve oynanışa iyi yedirilmiş. Bu bulmacalar kimi zaman bir platform bulmacası olurken kimi zaman ise "kareleri yerine oturt" şeklinde olabiliyor. Vuruş hissi güzel. Doom'u andıran bir oynanıştan birden bire bir atari oyununa oradan bir iç ısıtıcı, rahatlatıcı bir oyuna geçiş yaptığınız çok boyutlu bir ortamı var. Zannediyorum karakterimizin zihnindeki git gelleri yansıtması amacıyla böyle tasarlanmış. Elbette çok büyük bir beklentiniz olmamasını tavsiye ediyorum ancak tam anlamıyla çok boyutlu bir oyun denilebilecek ve güzel işlenmiş yüksek indirimde alabileceğiniz iyi oyunlardan olan bu oyunu denemenizi öneriyorum.

The gameplay is serviceable but unexciting and unimaginitive, which is where the story is supposed to come in and do some heavy lifting. Sadly, the story falls into a category I would call esoteric nonsense. Maybe it could resonate with some people, but for me this is just incomprehensible and half-baked ideas masquerading as existentialism and the deepest of thoughts. It was not worth my time and I wish I hadn't bought it or played it.

Overall a mixed bag that I don't see appealing to really anyone. There are too many baffling design decisions to recommend. I will say that the game has a certain earnest charm to it and I liked the designs of some of the characters. Occasionally the gunplay has a fun moment or two but overall it's a painfully bland experience. The game feels confused, like it didn't know what it wanted to be, and as other reviewers have noted almost feels like a school project designed for some Philosophy 101 class than a proper game. It feels like someone's philosophic and psychological ramblings interspersed with small bits of gameplay that don't really add up to anything. Nothing ever builds, the game is so busy throwing you into another wacky hallucination there's never any time to let things sit or feel meaningful. All the characters are written pretty dreadfully, in that I feel absolutely nothing for any of them because rather than give them backstories or interesting personalities they're all just mouthpieces for the developers pseudo-intellectual ramblings and it comes off both pretentious and ineffectual at developing a mood and feels very hamfisted and amateurish like the dev is trying to show off his writing journal and how intellectual and deep he is when all the observations are quite surface level and frankly BORING to anyone who has taken a psych or philosophy 101 class. A game like this absolutely leans on the power of its writing and it's painfully dry and not stimulating in any meaningful way. None of the characters feel like real personalities, they're just cardboard cutouts saying the next line, they lack any kind unique voice. Anyone looking for something ACTUALLY thought provoking won't find it very enjoyable as it's all surface level and mind numbing, and anyone who was looking for solid gunplay and something like an FPS will also be disappointed because you'll only get small segments of actually shooting anything and will be doing mindless fetch quests like delivering mail or fixing leaking pipes rather than something interesting. Too bland as a walking simulator and too slogged and poorly paced to even resemble a proper FPS, a confused mishmash that never really amounts to anything profound or entertaining. Another gripe, you get the ability to level select after completing the game, but it purposefully prevents you from earning the achievements when doing this, why?! It's such a stupid and baffling decision, and it's not a good sign that the achievements seem to imply the dev wanted me to slog through this game 5 separate times just to get mildly different endings that genuinely I don't care about. Maybe I'd have given the "pacifist" playthrough a shot but I don't feel like doing 2 hours of the same busywork over and over. The dev should have given the player agency to just skip around the chapters and get the different endings in an easier way, there's no point in having multiple endings when the game is so boring on its own it needs to be 90% filler to be called a game. Bad experience overall, I just cannot see this appealing to anyone. In my mind proof that games on Steam can have a positive rating just because a bunch of people loved the "pretty colors" in all reality the game is mixed at best or bad depending on the taste of the individual. I'd recommend to the dev to keep working on the great art and I hope they give making a true FPS a shot because an FPS in this kind of universe could be kind of neat, unfortunately this is BARELY even a skeleton of an FPS and I think tagging it as such on the Steam page is slightly misleading.

Это аудиовизуальное произведение отвечает всем стандартам современной эпохи, может похвастаться передовой графикой и актуальным для жанра сюжетом. Сложность игры вдохновлена ​​такими захватывающими играми, как Dark Souls и её серия. Одним словом, она потрясающая.

Вы никогда не задумывались о том, что находитсья в вашем мозгу и какие мысли, страхи там, или другие вещи, вас подстерегают. Или о чём вы бы хотели думать? Так вот, эта игра, через призму вашего ГГ покажет, чтобы было, если бы вы оказались в каком то гипотетическом, своём подсознанческом мире. Эта игра в жанре шутер, стилизованная под старый Doom, который познакомит вас со многими красивыми и отталкивающими мирами , местными жителями и такой, своеобразной ностальгической атмосферой того времени (так как когда я проходил данную игру, меня не покидало такое ощущение, что я играл в какой то мод по Квейку). По сюжету вы берёте роль рандомного персонажа, который создаёте на ваш выбор и начинаете ваш долгий и интересный квест-приключение. Игра реально затягивает и заставляет задуматься о такой вещи как смысл жизни, так как сама игра не только хороша в плане визуала, но и пропитана этакими психологическими вопросами. Как например: есть ли жизнь после Смэрти?" и вот в таком духе. Я нехочу даже эту тему поднимать, потому что игра очень неплохо с этим справляеться и убежать от этих вопросов было очень сложно ... Это часть нашего Бытия. Лучше скажу что рекомендую данную игру, потому что недочётов я не нашёл да и сама игра-эт прямо как арбузная конфета- жуёшь её или сосёшь и такой вкусный, сладкий привкус ощущаете и некую страсть к исследованиям локаций.(Некоторые локации кстати, напомнили мне всеми нашумевший Бэкрумс или шоу Трумана, где небыло ни людей, а были какие то дома, окна, всякие там машины, или например лес.) А если и были люди, то они как то враждебно были настроены(а кроме людей, была ещё и какая то живность). В игре есть несколько концовок, поэтому я бы лучше проходил игру так, как лично ВЫ думаете ...Как бы вы поступили))? Это вам и предстоит узнать, сыграв в данный продукт. А я ставлю игре свой заслуженный белый перчаточный лайк)).

This game is, sadly, hella dookie. A full playthrough takes ~90 minutes and the overwhelming majority of that will be reading the long, winding story. The story is 50% self-help you-can-do-it type gibbering and 50% vague philosophical ideas, but at the depth you get from your weedhead friend at 3am when he's completely zooted beyond his gourd. It's all very surface level and... forgive me for uttering this word; Cringe. It's absolutely omnipresent too. The levels are all (vaguely) themed around some kind of cardinal sin or maturation stepping stone, ie gluttony, anxiety or self-actualization; The NPCs are constantly yapping about it both in the levels and when you go back to the tavern; There is poetry jammed into every loading screen, and there's even song lyric snippets graffitied on many of the walls. I swear, seeing song lyrics from Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" on the inside of a log in minecraft skyblock was so surreal. Up until that point I had envisioned the dev as some pimply 16 year old, and now he's suddenly Damo from the traino mumbling along to the car stereo while cooking snags out next to the hills hoist. Whiplash. Anyway, aside from the story. - The FPS gameplay is more in line with Wolfenstein 3D and Blakestone than it is Doom and its contemporaries. We're talking generally flat geometry and enemy pathfinding that just draws a straight line to the player and doesn't try to navigate around obstacles. Enemies are flat 2D billboards in a 3D environment, just like Wolf3D, but now with soft Unity lighting in garish colours. - 6 weapons, three of which are functionally identical melees. The three guns are pistol, smg and shotgun. - Enemy variety is nothing. Everything except the Rats, which are generic hitscanners, will just walk up and suck your toes. Only one enemy type per level, no mixing. I know it looks zany and interesting based on the screenshots, but it really, really isn't.

“This strange realm of mine” subverts whatever expectations you might have of it. If you expect a Doom clone, you’ll be hit with atmospheric and visual storytelling. Where you’d expect Psychological-Horror tropes of storytelling, you’ll find moments of authentic positivity, too sincere to opt to be edgy for its own sake. Where you’d expect indie slop, you’ll see a game that isn’t apologetic about being indie, but tries its absolute best to give you polished work, through whatever means are available to it. You might feel it’s quite edgy, with its emo-lyrics style poems, but you’ll soon realize that whenever you thought to yourself, “edgelord tropes, when done right and with sincerity can actually be quite endearing”, this game would tick that box for you. Aside from the music that was genuinely so captivating (so much so, that the first thing I’ve done after beating the game is purchase the soundtrack immediately), this game knows how not to drag. Combat…but not so much that you start forgetting the plot. Plot and dialogue…but not so much you feel you’re in a railroaded visual novel that you don’t care about. Edge…but not so much that your eyes roll so back, they get lost at the back of your skull. Uplifting moments of hope…but not so much that you feel it’s a feel-good Kumbaya game with a generic life lesson. Simplicity…but not so much that you feel that the dev is a coward, and you’re paying the price of their cowardice. Depth…but not so much that you feel you’re j*rking off the dev and how unique they think their philosophical takes are. Sincerity. Sincerity is the keyword. When an artist is sincere, they don’t feel they have to overcompensate in any direction. The dev came, made something they think is beautiful, didn’t overstay their welcome, and left. And it’s that very attitude that will make this game live rent free in your head…but not so much. It will just linger there softly. Like a quiet passenger in the back of your head.

По-глупому претенциозно, но по факту просто нелепо скроенная история про посмертие в максимально неподходящем для этого формате. Рандомные в своем антураже уровни, обрывистость игрового темпа, ненужные механики. Гораздо важнее было бы сконцентрироваться на выстраивании атмосферы и крепкого геймплея, вместо того, чтобы делать то, что сделал автор. Смысл и гемность найдут только люди склонные к СПГС или явно нестабильные ментально персоны. Проходите мимо. Такие проекты нельзя поощрять, тк они узурпируют на важных темах, но по сути тем самым вытягивают деньги из кармана доверчивого геймера, на деле возвращая ему игровой опыт в стиле "сделал херню на геймджеме на коленке"

for a random purchase, this is unexpectedly a good play