This Strange Realm of Mine describes itself as a "First Person Shooter mixed with poetry and psychological horror", but I'd say that's not quite accurate. A better description would be something along the lines of a philosophical Action-Adventure with a focus on poetry and some occasional FPS sections which seem to serve no real purpose beyond warding off the dreaded "walking sim"-tag. The balancing is all over the place, with all the challenge effectively concentrated in the very first level. Gameplay just seems extremely half-assed on the whole, with slap-dash, simplistic level design and a small selection of uninteresting weapons to be used against endless recolors of the same two enemy types. It's pretty obvious that the game's main focus is in the writing, and to be fair, it's quite ambitious, dealing with a variety of grand philosophical themes like the importance of free will and the true nature of consciousness. It's heady stuff, perhaps too much for the game to handle. With one exception, the game makes no attempt to integrate the writing into the actual gameplay, instead it just buries the player under cliched, badly written dialogue at every opportunity. What little plot there is largely takes the place of barely connected vignettes which usually involve meeting a new character, and helping them out in some manner, usually by going through some repetitive gameplay section. Afterwards, you can choose to invite them to the hub world, where they will stand around, ready to engage in overlong dialogues with all the riveting depth and entertainment value of the text on the back of a self-help book. The problem is that these characters are really just intended as stand-ins for whatever philosophical concept the game wants to ruminate on, rather than actual personalities, which leads to dialogues feeling very empty and repetitive. A playthrough only takes about 2-3 hours, though there's some replayability (in theory anyway) through dialogue choices which can lead to different endings and even some levels being switched out for different ones.
In the end then, it's a game with quite a few unique ideas that someone obviously put some thought into. Just a shame it doesn't succeed at anything it sets out to do. The gameplay is generic and overly simplistic, the presentation lacks charm and the writing feels undercooked and amateurish. Even at its extremely cheap (discounted) price, I'd have trouble recommending it to anyone.
Final rating: 5.8/10
originally written on 27/12/2022
