Broken Reality

Steam currently has over 100,000 games for sale on its marketplace. You could choose to get something familiar, something you know you'll enjoy. There's nothing wrong if you want to stick with Good Old Rock. After all, nothing beats Rock.

Sometimes though, you've got to get a little crazy and see where a new weird-looking game will take you. Have no illusions, I picked this title up precisely because it looked completely out of its mind. A game like this requires a certain je ne sais quoi from the person or persons developing it. Suffice to say that Dynamic Media Triad, despite the fact that they all look pretty normal on their website, has to be putting something serious in the water in order to end up with the Polynesian acid-trip that is Broken Reality.

The "story" in this game, if you want to be really loose with that word, is about getting Likes using a Thumbs Up that you snag as your first order of business in the Internet Space (?) you now inhabit. That's right, you live in the World Wide Web, as if you didn't get tortured enough by it already. With this tool you can now "Like" a number of things, from clicking on floating ads, to engaging the locals in conversation. Many of the locals don't quite care for you, and will tell you so, just like the real internet!

Like any good internet-focused satire, you will encounter many a meme to interact with. Some of them will even give you side quests. Others are just there "for the lulz" which, you know, occasionally made me snicker but it's no Brooklyn Nine-Nine I'll tell you that.

Broken Reality's environments are disorienting to say the least...I regularly got lost and doubled back only to realize I was heading the right direction in the first place. There's a Super Mario World type map that you can access, but you're just as likely to misread it as you are to understand what it is trying to tell you. When every texture feels like it is grabbing your eyeballs and yanking, it's hard to get your bearings.

Not that you will be lacking anything to do. There's something weird and wonderful around every corner. As you collect more tools from the NPCs sending you on quests, the game starts to make backtracking almost tolerable, in a Metroidvania sort of way. Some light puzzles act as tutorials for the tools when you get them, but most of the time you won't be straining your grey matter to figure out where to use each tool.

Every now and then the game will throw a mini-game at you just for the Hell of it. I couldn't tell you whether it was necessary for me to get a high score on these (it didn't seem like it) and yet I was compelled to do them anyway, as if being in this world was making me dumber, minute by minute. I say bring on the lobotomy.

You have to obtain a certain number of likes before you can move on to the next area each time (YOU MUST BE TRENDY) so it's best not to skip anything on your way. Milk those likes to the bone. Be the attention whore you were born to be!

For what seems like an art project, the game has a healthy amount of area to explore. I was honestly surprised by the variety of zones within each region, even if they all made me want to puke up 16-bit rainbows. I suppose that was what they were going for though. 

The verticality in particular was impressive, there was a real sense of scale to what would otherwise have been a fairly brief walk. Plenty of twisting tunnels, random rooms (some with their own funky soundtracks) and cleverly hidden drop-offs increase the time you'll spend navigating the nooks and crannies. For better and for worse.

Broken Reality is an experience, you can count on that, but it's not an experience for everybody. You have to really want something outside the box, something that will occasionally make you feel ill even though you can't put your finger on why. The content you encounter will make you laugh or groan, and you'll almost inevitably get frustrated walking around until you stumble across the next weird character. I think I may still be coming down from the whole ordeal, so let's give it an 8.