Dear Escapist friends,
since the beginning of the year there've been three indie game I've been playing that had one thing in common. They were all, to some extent, about the 1990s and the way we remember them. The three of them are fairly different games but I believe that every single one of them is interesting in its own right. And I felt that maybe they deserve to be talked about. So, here's my personal impressions and thoughts about them.
The first and arguably weakest of the three games is called "YIIK - A Postmodern RPG", the YIIK, in case you're wondering, being pronounced as "Y2K".
Now, YIIK is probably the most mechanically sophisticated of the three games, being pretty much a full fledged turn based Japanese style RPG. YIIK follows the story of Alex Eggleston, a flannel wearing proto hipster returning from college in the year 1999 with very little direction in life. In his hometown Frankton he sees a young girl being abducted by strange extradimensional creatures after following a cat with whiskers that resemble the mustache of surrealist painter Salvador Dali to an abandoned factory. Thus begins a rather mind bending adventure.
YIIK is a game with very big aspirations. The twists and turns of its plot are as byzantine as they're hard to describe but I'm willing to concede that there's something substantial there. Alex, along with a party consisting of his childhood friend and Sheldon Cooper lookalike Michael, snarky chick with a dark secret Vella, pacifist Rory and African American siblings Claudio and Chondra, investigate the disappearance by venturing into peoples minds, tracking down a magical music LP, seeking out an android from a different dimension and venturing into the "Soul Space" a metaphysical plane between dimensions. All of which takes place mostly between small towns in late 90s America.
YIIK is a game with a large number of eclectic influences. The most obvious of which is probably Earthbound, which it takes a lot of inspiration from, but throughout its plot there are elements reminiscent, if not downright referential, of the Persona series, Twin Peaks, Psychonauts, South Park, the novels of Haruki Murakami, Night in the Woods, Scott Pilgrim and Final Fantasy. Those influences coalesce into something that should technically be interesting. And it technically is.
See, there's a pretty unique story, conveyed with some pretty inventive visuals, in there somewhere but YIIK has a tendency to come off as pretentious rather than ambitious. Alex Eggleston isn't exactly what you'd call a very likeable protagonist, and he's obviously not intended to be, as overcoming his own demons is at the core of the games narrative, but honestly, the guy's hard to put up with. Alex is a self centered brat who loves to hear himself talk and we, the player, get to listen to a lot of his (fully voiced) monologues. The dialogue in the game in general is in desperate need of an editor, there's a lot of it and most of it is fairly redundant. The narrative itself is interesting but messy, throwing together a lot of different and, to be fair, not exactly simple ideas about the nature of death, the concept of soul, parallel dimensions, the nature of reality and what it means to grow up. Some of which sure managed to make me think but very few of which it actually had something coherent to say about.
The game is set in the 90s and the approach of Y2K, which is connected to some apocalyptic events in YIIK, is an important plot point but really, there's not too much YIIK seems to have to say about the decade. Sure, people reference games and movies from the time period, Alex and Michael go on a forum about conspiracy theories and the game sure seems to go for a late 90s low polygon look in its graphics, but generally speaking the game might as well have been set in 2009. It doesn't exactly help that the main characters are certainly all dressed like they're from the early 10s, Alex especially looking like part of a subculture that wouldn't exist for another decade. Well, maybe there's something there that's very specific to a time period where the internet wasn't yet omnipresent. Where you would still go on a road trip with your friends, investigating a mystery bigger than any of you, where internet cafes and shopping malls still existed.
Up to this point YIIK might sound like a game you'd enjoy, because, on these virtues alone, I would have probably enjoyed it. As a matter of fact playing as a douchey hipster investigating metaphysical mysteries in late 90s America seems like exactly the type of thing I'd be into. But that's where we have to talk about the gameplay.
See, it's... well, it's not good. In fact, it's pretty awful. I have to admit, I'm not exactly a fan of turn based RPGs in general but even I can tell that YIIK is not a good example of one. YIIK had the bright idea of spicing up its combat with Paper Mario style minigames, most of them basically quicktime events, to make it more engaging. The main problem is that most of these minigames take too long and many attacks don't hit at all unless you pull them off. Add to that that enemies tend to have considerably too much health. And add to that in turn, that enemy attacks also come with their own QTE for dodging them. So, let's imagine a combat encounter wih four enemies. All of these enemies have an attack that could hit every single party members. Four people are in your party. So all of these four enemies use that attack and you have to do the minigame for each party member. So that means doing a repetive five seconds minigame sixteen times before it's your turn again to attack. YIIK does have a button to speed up combat and a function to make it easier but honestly, the only way to fix it would have been to make it skippable entirely. Even when I was enjoying the game for its writing and its visuals I dreaded every single combat encounter.
Levelling up comes with a similarly unnecessarily time consuming mechanic. The idea is, to level up you have to enter the protagonists "mind dungeon" where you have four doors for each levelup. So, for these four doors you have to pick an attribute, then enter the door to level it up. Now, imagine having to that when you have enough XP to level up multiple times. That's a lot of unnecessary busywork. To it's credit, at least the mind dungeon has some really catchy music.
The music in general, like almost everything about the game is a very mixed bag. If you've heard about this game at all, you might have heard about it because Undertale's Toby Fox contributed one of the battle themes. And it's a pretty good one, sadly the music ranges from legitimately great to absolutely grating and battles taking as long as they do, you have to listen to some pretty bad music for a pretty long time.
So, all things considered, YIIK is... special. There's something in there that I appreciate, something creative and weird and unique, the problem is, YIIK is, on a fundamental level, not fun to play and not well written enough to make its better ideas really shine. If the game was irredeemable shit from beginning to end this wouldn't have been nearly as frustrating to write but what's good about it is so good that I can't help but be all the more annoyed about the rest. There's part of me that wants to say "Hey, check it out, you might get something out of it" but honestly, chances are you wont enjoy it. As of now YIIK has two endings, the normal one and a hidden one, both of which are abrupt and hardly tie up any loose ends. I could have probably looked past a lot of its issues if it ended on a stronger note but it didn't. I guess my closing statement is: It's a bad game but at least it's interestingly bad.
Our second game's called Hypnospace Outlaw
It's the most recent on of the three, having come out on March 12th this year. Hypnospace Outlaw is, for lack of a better term, a point and click adventure game about moderating a satirical yet impressively authentic recreation of the 90s internet. Well, almost, the framing device is that it's a version of the internet you don't access through your computer but by wearing a headset that projects it right into your mind while you sleep. Which... matters surprisingly little, except for being sorta relevant to a plotpoint late in the game.
Hypnospace is a beautiful tribute to Web 1.0, a vast, yet surprisingly tight community of personal homepages, chatrooms, hobbyist sites and first attempts of companies and celebrities to establish a web presence. Before web design had become a matter left to professionals and when most sites were garish eyesores composed of various fonts, colours and animated gifs. The age of AOL and Geocities.
Hypnospace has a lot to discover, enough to keep the player busy for quite a while. It's surrealist internet exists in its own little world of absurdities that aren't quite identical to the early internet of our world. People play a game called "SquisherZ" instead of Pokemon (and of course there's a fundamentalist christian site warning of its satanic subtext), instead of Tennis there's a sport named Trennis with incomprehensible rules and a washed up Rockstar named Chowderman is trying to reinvent himself by... singing songs about shaving razors for television commercials.
Music in general is a surprisingly big part of Hypnospace Outlaw. It's easy to tell that the person behind it has a background in music. It goes out of its way to detail various fictional musical genres and the subcultures around it. Genres like "Earthaze" and "Coolpunk" and fittingly, the game does have a very strong soundtrack that I find myself listening to even outside the game.
There are a lot of little pieces of interactivity in the game. You can download a virtual pet, explore various sites, gain access to exclusive communities play a bunch of minigames... Hypnospace offers a plethora of quirky little distractions to keep you busy even outside of the plot.
Oh, right, the plot. Now here's where things get interesting. Hypnospace could have easily just been a nostalgic toy for people who grew up with the early internet, a funny throwback to a more innocent time but Hypnospace Outlaw is about something. Something very timely for a game so deeply rooted in in a time about 20 years ago.
As I briefly mentioned, the actual story involves moderating the internet. Over 4 days you remove copyright infringement, track down hackers, investigate harrassment, crack down on extralegal commerce and illegal music sharing and... well, solve a crime that had rather severe consequences even outside of Hypnospace. It's an internet detective game that starts of light hearted enough, giving you an opportunity to explore Hypnospace and familiarize yourself with its characters. And the game does a fantastic job characterizing them through their web presence alone! You have punk kid Zane and his poorly drawn, hyperviolent webcomic, teen girl Tiffany who writes what we'd now call creepypasta, nerdy couple Gill and Karen, amateur hacker t1mageddon... a variety of colorful personality you'll feel like you know rather well by the end of the game.
Of course the actual story eventually does get quite a bit darker and does delve into the history of Hypnospace and it's one that seems surprisingly relevant. The internet has changed a lot since the late 90s and Hypnospace does its best to describe these changes. It's tutorial mission, about removing childrens drawings of a cartoon fish from an elementary school teacher homepage, doesn't seem quite as funny now, a day after the European Union passed a law including the implementation of mandatory "upload filters" to protect copyrighted content.
Hypnospace Outlaw is to no small part a story about how the internet has lost its soul. About how creativity and self expression died in favour of mass apeal and its monopolization by large corporations with little regard for its userbase. Small, geeky sites that have been closed so that they wont scare away "normal people", sharing of music and free software not supported by provider "MerchantSoft" is forbidden and mistakes by MerchantSoft are covered up and blamed on users.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a very funny game but there's something somwhat melancholy about it. It's about the life, but also the death, of the early internet. Where it was full of mysteries and possibilities. Before Google. Before YoutTube. Before Facebook. Earlier on I mentioned that there's little reason for Hypnospace to be accessed through a futuristic headset projecting it into the users dreams. But maybe there is, from a thematical perspective. Maybe that's what the internet was. A shared dream. One that was eventually bought and sold to the highest bidder.
Hypnospace Outlaw is, by all means, a pretty good game. I have a few criticisms, mostly that it could have easily had more cases and a longer story but I'd say that, as far as criticisms go, "I wish there was more of it" is a pretty glowing endorsement. Hypnospace Outlaw is a thoroughly enjoyable trip down memory lane with a story that's very, very relevant and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
And this brings us to our last game: 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 polygons, 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 hoping for when you were a kid in the 90s and a teen in the 00s
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 fairly 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 managed 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 mashes staring at their phone 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 its filled to the brim with blunt, sometimes downright vulgar, jokes and more or less obscure references. A mission in Geocity asks you to, literally, pirate 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.
since the beginning of the year there've been three indie game I've been playing that had one thing in common. They were all, to some extent, about the 1990s and the way we remember them. The three of them are fairly different games but I believe that every single one of them is interesting in its own right. And I felt that maybe they deserve to be talked about. So, here's my personal impressions and thoughts about them.
The first and arguably weakest of the three games is called "YIIK - A Postmodern RPG", the YIIK, in case you're wondering, being pronounced as "Y2K".
Now, YIIK is probably the most mechanically sophisticated of the three games, being pretty much a full fledged turn based Japanese style RPG. YIIK follows the story of Alex Eggleston, a flannel wearing proto hipster returning from college in the year 1999 with very little direction in life. In his hometown Frankton he sees a young girl being abducted by strange extradimensional creatures after following a cat with whiskers that resemble the mustache of surrealist painter Salvador Dali to an abandoned factory. Thus begins a rather mind bending adventure.
YIIK is a game with very big aspirations. The twists and turns of its plot are as byzantine as they're hard to describe but I'm willing to concede that there's something substantial there. Alex, along with a party consisting of his childhood friend and Sheldon Cooper lookalike Michael, snarky chick with a dark secret Vella, pacifist Rory and African American siblings Claudio and Chondra, investigate the disappearance by venturing into peoples minds, tracking down a magical music LP, seeking out an android from a different dimension and venturing into the "Soul Space" a metaphysical plane between dimensions. All of which takes place mostly between small towns in late 90s America.
YIIK is a game with a large number of eclectic influences. The most obvious of which is probably Earthbound, which it takes a lot of inspiration from, but throughout its plot there are elements reminiscent, if not downright referential, of the Persona series, Twin Peaks, Psychonauts, South Park, the novels of Haruki Murakami, Night in the Woods, Scott Pilgrim and Final Fantasy. Those influences coalesce into something that should technically be interesting. And it technically is.
See, there's a pretty unique story, conveyed with some pretty inventive visuals, in there somewhere but YIIK has a tendency to come off as pretentious rather than ambitious. Alex Eggleston isn't exactly what you'd call a very likeable protagonist, and he's obviously not intended to be, as overcoming his own demons is at the core of the games narrative, but honestly, the guy's hard to put up with. Alex is a self centered brat who loves to hear himself talk and we, the player, get to listen to a lot of his (fully voiced) monologues. The dialogue in the game in general is in desperate need of an editor, there's a lot of it and most of it is fairly redundant. The narrative itself is interesting but messy, throwing together a lot of different and, to be fair, not exactly simple ideas about the nature of death, the concept of soul, parallel dimensions, the nature of reality and what it means to grow up. Some of which sure managed to make me think but very few of which it actually had something coherent to say about.
The game is set in the 90s and the approach of Y2K, which is connected to some apocalyptic events in YIIK, is an important plot point but really, there's not too much YIIK seems to have to say about the decade. Sure, people reference games and movies from the time period, Alex and Michael go on a forum about conspiracy theories and the game sure seems to go for a late 90s low polygon look in its graphics, but generally speaking the game might as well have been set in 2009. It doesn't exactly help that the main characters are certainly all dressed like they're from the early 10s, Alex especially looking like part of a subculture that wouldn't exist for another decade. Well, maybe there's something there that's very specific to a time period where the internet wasn't yet omnipresent. Where you would still go on a road trip with your friends, investigating a mystery bigger than any of you, where internet cafes and shopping malls still existed.
Up to this point YIIK might sound like a game you'd enjoy, because, on these virtues alone, I would have probably enjoyed it. As a matter of fact playing as a douchey hipster investigating metaphysical mysteries in late 90s America seems like exactly the type of thing I'd be into. But that's where we have to talk about the gameplay.
See, it's... well, it's not good. In fact, it's pretty awful. I have to admit, I'm not exactly a fan of turn based RPGs in general but even I can tell that YIIK is not a good example of one. YIIK had the bright idea of spicing up its combat with Paper Mario style minigames, most of them basically quicktime events, to make it more engaging. The main problem is that most of these minigames take too long and many attacks don't hit at all unless you pull them off. Add to that that enemies tend to have considerably too much health. And add to that in turn, that enemy attacks also come with their own QTE for dodging them. So, let's imagine a combat encounter wih four enemies. All of these enemies have an attack that could hit every single party members. Four people are in your party. So all of these four enemies use that attack and you have to do the minigame for each party member. So that means doing a repetive five seconds minigame sixteen times before it's your turn again to attack. YIIK does have a button to speed up combat and a function to make it easier but honestly, the only way to fix it would have been to make it skippable entirely. Even when I was enjoying the game for its writing and its visuals I dreaded every single combat encounter.
Levelling up comes with a similarly unnecessarily time consuming mechanic. The idea is, to level up you have to enter the protagonists "mind dungeon" where you have four doors for each levelup. So, for these four doors you have to pick an attribute, then enter the door to level it up. Now, imagine having to that when you have enough XP to level up multiple times. That's a lot of unnecessary busywork. To it's credit, at least the mind dungeon has some really catchy music.
The music in general, like almost everything about the game is a very mixed bag. If you've heard about this game at all, you might have heard about it because Undertale's Toby Fox contributed one of the battle themes. And it's a pretty good one, sadly the music ranges from legitimately great to absolutely grating and battles taking as long as they do, you have to listen to some pretty bad music for a pretty long time.
So, all things considered, YIIK is... special. There's something in there that I appreciate, something creative and weird and unique, the problem is, YIIK is, on a fundamental level, not fun to play and not well written enough to make its better ideas really shine. If the game was irredeemable shit from beginning to end this wouldn't have been nearly as frustrating to write but what's good about it is so good that I can't help but be all the more annoyed about the rest. There's part of me that wants to say "Hey, check it out, you might get something out of it" but honestly, chances are you wont enjoy it. As of now YIIK has two endings, the normal one and a hidden one, both of which are abrupt and hardly tie up any loose ends. I could have probably looked past a lot of its issues if it ended on a stronger note but it didn't. I guess my closing statement is: It's a bad game but at least it's interestingly bad.
Our second game's called Hypnospace Outlaw
It's the most recent on of the three, having come out on March 12th this year. Hypnospace Outlaw is, for lack of a better term, a point and click adventure game about moderating a satirical yet impressively authentic recreation of the 90s internet. Well, almost, the framing device is that it's a version of the internet you don't access through your computer but by wearing a headset that projects it right into your mind while you sleep. Which... matters surprisingly little, except for being sorta relevant to a plotpoint late in the game.
Hypnospace is a beautiful tribute to Web 1.0, a vast, yet surprisingly tight community of personal homepages, chatrooms, hobbyist sites and first attempts of companies and celebrities to establish a web presence. Before web design had become a matter left to professionals and when most sites were garish eyesores composed of various fonts, colours and animated gifs. The age of AOL and Geocities.
Hypnospace has a lot to discover, enough to keep the player busy for quite a while. It's surrealist internet exists in its own little world of absurdities that aren't quite identical to the early internet of our world. People play a game called "SquisherZ" instead of Pokemon (and of course there's a fundamentalist christian site warning of its satanic subtext), instead of Tennis there's a sport named Trennis with incomprehensible rules and a washed up Rockstar named Chowderman is trying to reinvent himself by... singing songs about shaving razors for television commercials.
Music in general is a surprisingly big part of Hypnospace Outlaw. It's easy to tell that the person behind it has a background in music. It goes out of its way to detail various fictional musical genres and the subcultures around it. Genres like "Earthaze" and "Coolpunk" and fittingly, the game does have a very strong soundtrack that I find myself listening to even outside the game.
There are a lot of little pieces of interactivity in the game. You can download a virtual pet, explore various sites, gain access to exclusive communities play a bunch of minigames... Hypnospace offers a plethora of quirky little distractions to keep you busy even outside of the plot.
Oh, right, the plot. Now here's where things get interesting. Hypnospace could have easily just been a nostalgic toy for people who grew up with the early internet, a funny throwback to a more innocent time but Hypnospace Outlaw is about something. Something very timely for a game so deeply rooted in in a time about 20 years ago.
As I briefly mentioned, the actual story involves moderating the internet. Over 4 days you remove copyright infringement, track down hackers, investigate harrassment, crack down on extralegal commerce and illegal music sharing and... well, solve a crime that had rather severe consequences even outside of Hypnospace. It's an internet detective game that starts of light hearted enough, giving you an opportunity to explore Hypnospace and familiarize yourself with its characters. And the game does a fantastic job characterizing them through their web presence alone! You have punk kid Zane and his poorly drawn, hyperviolent webcomic, teen girl Tiffany who writes what we'd now call creepypasta, nerdy couple Gill and Karen, amateur hacker t1mageddon... a variety of colorful personality you'll feel like you know rather well by the end of the game.
Of course the actual story eventually does get quite a bit darker and does delve into the history of Hypnospace and it's one that seems surprisingly relevant. The internet has changed a lot since the late 90s and Hypnospace does its best to describe these changes. It's tutorial mission, about removing childrens drawings of a cartoon fish from an elementary school teacher homepage, doesn't seem quite as funny now, a day after the European Union passed a law including the implementation of mandatory "upload filters" to protect copyrighted content.
Hypnospace Outlaw is to no small part a story about how the internet has lost its soul. About how creativity and self expression died in favour of mass apeal and its monopolization by large corporations with little regard for its userbase. Small, geeky sites that have been closed so that they wont scare away "normal people", sharing of music and free software not supported by provider "MerchantSoft" is forbidden and mistakes by MerchantSoft are covered up and blamed on users.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a very funny game but there's something somwhat melancholy about it. It's about the life, but also the death, of the early internet. Where it was full of mysteries and possibilities. Before Google. Before YoutTube. Before Facebook. Earlier on I mentioned that there's little reason for Hypnospace to be accessed through a futuristic headset projecting it into the users dreams. But maybe there is, from a thematical perspective. Maybe that's what the internet was. A shared dream. One that was eventually bought and sold to the highest bidder.
Hypnospace Outlaw is, by all means, a pretty good game. I have a few criticisms, mostly that it could have easily had more cases and a longer story but I'd say that, as far as criticisms go, "I wish there was more of it" is a pretty glowing endorsement. Hypnospace Outlaw is a thoroughly enjoyable trip down memory lane with a story that's very, very relevant and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
And this brings us to our last game: 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 polygons, 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 hoping for when you were a kid in the 90s and a teen in the 00s
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 fairly 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 managed 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 mashes staring at their phone 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 its filled to the brim with blunt, sometimes downright vulgar, jokes and more or less obscure references. A mission in Geocity asks you to, literally, pirate 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.