Broken Reality Review – Review
Broken Reality is one of the most bizarre yet immediately captivating adventure games I have ever played. For those the right age to remember some of the weird early days of the internet, you may get a strange sense of nostalgia. For everyone else, the otherworldly vaporwave environments that Broken Reality presents will simply be a joy to take in.
At its core Broken Reality is an adventure game played in the first person. It owes much of its design philosophy to classic point and click adventures while also borrowing some progression elements from the Metroidvania genre. The entire game takes place within an abstract representation of the internet. The first major area will ease you into all of your basic abilities: A sword to cut through pop-ups, a pointer that allows you to follow hyperlinks (grapple points), a camera, and more. To get each of these abilities, you’ll explore the opening island, talking to its denizens and solving puzzles. It took me about an hour to finish the opening area and by the time I did I felt like I had already experienced a full game. To some degree it reminded me of the Great Plateau in the intro to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild–a perfect tutorial that serves as a miniaturized version of the rest of the game.
Throughout the opening you’ll begin picking up on the underlying narrative behind Broken Reality. The plot, while not being too overt, deals with real-world themes of the open internet. Given the generally goofy tone the game presents, I wasn’t expecting to be as immediately invested in the plot as I was. It isn’t heavy handed, and for those just playing for the fun of exploring these worlds, the story largely stays out of your way. But if you dig a little deeper, characters are genuinely funny, often-times subversive, and the underlying narrative thread is pretty engaging.
Upon completing the opening area you’ll move into a central hub zone. From here you’ll have access to an assortment of other worlds, with world access predicated on the number of likes you’ve received. Likes can be obtained in a variety of ways: some are strewn out as collectibles across the various worlds, but the majority are obtained by completing quests. These generally all flow into a larger underlying quest for that particular world. For example, in one world I needed to restore power to a central structure by solving a series of puzzles in outlying temples. Some were based on using a new ability to see invisible platforms and objects. Another required me to solve math problems using values hidden throughout the environment.
In general, you’ll find yourself completing most objectives in one world before moving onto the next, simply in order to have enough likes to gain access. That being said, each world also enhances one or more of your abilities, and returning to previous worlds with new abilities generally yields new rewards.
Broken Reality’s roots are on PC, and now and then that shows through on Switch in less than flattering ways. For example on-screen prompts and menus are navigated with a cursor. This makes clicking through text boxes or navigating through your map and quest log a chore. To the game’s credit, it does allow you to interact with all of these things via the touch screen, but at the end of the day proper button mapping for these elements would be much preferred. In addition to touch controls for interacting with prompts, Broken Reality also offers support for motion based aiming which can be toggled via the minus button. While there isn’t really any fast paced combat you’ll need to worry about, I did find this handy for a later camera upgrade that requires you to target multiple (occasionally small) objects in sequence.
Switch performance overall is largely good. Now and then a more complex area can cause momentary frame drops, but most of the time the game runs at a stable frame-rate. I did notice what was likely some sort of memory leak, where after I had left the game running for multiple days the frame rate seemed to get significantly worse. A quick reset and performance was back up where it should be. I will note that the solo developer has told me he is already working on a post launch patch. Given the excellent performance of his other Switch release, Astrodogs, which I reviewed back in 2022, I feel confident that these minor performance issues will be addressed.
Broken Reality is one of those somewhat hard to categorize games. While I can pick out individual pieces and compare them to other things, as a whole it is a very unique experience. At multiple points I simply stopped to take it in, or say aloud “that’s really cool”. But it does all this while never taking itself too seriously. The Switch version comes with a few minor hiccups, but not enough to sour the experience. What you’re left with is an incredible adventure full of beautiful worlds, fun puzzles, and witty writing. Broken Reality is one of those games that is just fun to spend time in.
