The Itchy, Tasty Spooktathlon: This Strange Realm of Mine

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 27th

• Game: This Strange Realm of Mine
• Developer: Doomster Entertainment
• Release Year: 2017
• Available: Itch, Steam, Switch

Now this is a fascinating concept for a game: an elegiac FPS set in the metaphysical realm of the mind of a recently deceased human being, fighting their inner demons in a mixture of forms their fading consciousness can comprehend. This Strange Realm of Mine, which calls itself a "poetic, psychological horror game," is a low-poly FPS with a variety of different worlds to explore, each representing some part of the player character's psyche. It puts its metaphysical foot down early, setting you with the task of customizing your avatar before tossing it all out stating that death strips us of much of our identity -including gender, race, and status - and leaves only our moral center. The allusions to the mind start even earlier: on the title screen, quitting the game is referred to as "disassociating."

The first stretch of the game has you fighting little warped zombie creatures first with a torch and then with a handgun. The visuals and gameplay at this stage are rudimentary: the only furniture are bookcases and crates, and there's a vaguely medieval dungeon feel to the barred windows and stone walls. After that, you reach a non-hostile respite area with a friendly if enigmatic elf named Ulrich, and then you're suddenly whisked away to graffiti-ridden inner city streets filled with "rathugs": bipedal anthro rodents in gangbanger hoodies packing heat. The difficulty takes a marked uptick here, as the rats can absorb a lot more damage and have ranged attacks of their own. It's evident from this point that the game's not going to follow any kind of traditional structure for its progression, and there's no telling where it might send you next.

Sadly, this is one of those cases where Indie game designers working with the mercurial PC platform don't quite understand what "optimization" means. They make a hearty effort, offering modes as versatile as "good," "simple," "fast," and "potato" - each graphically inferior than the last, while easier on the framerate - but the graphical flourishes it diminishes on those later settings aren't at all the ones causing the slowdown. The third "world" of the game is a sewer filled with much tougher versions of the zombie monsters seen during the tutorial, who are now capable of quickly destroying you once they're in melee range, and yet the game lags like hell and moves in single-digit frames down there because of subtle mist effects, reflected light sources on the slick ground surfaces, what I imagine isn't ambient occlusion but is probably close enough, and other SFX that would not be at all possible in the '90s era of FPS games that the 2D sprite monsters and basic polyhedrons of This Strange Realm of Mine evokes. That the graphical settings don't account for any of them, even the lowest setting, is a bizarre misstep that makes this game impossible to play for the more... let's say, "economically priced" systems like my own. I can only speak to my own experiences, and I knew going in that my laptop regularly has problems pushing around polygonal graphics with its feeble integrated hardware, but I feel if you're making a retro-ass game it should probably function on a retro-ass PC. I'm not asking for Doom on a calculator or a smart fridge display, but a functional framerate would suffice.

So This Strange Realm of Mine is going to be one of those rare horror games I can't finish not because it's too scary to continue but because it craps the bed so magnificently with its technical problems that I can't see any avenue forward. A shame, because it clearly has some fun ideas and an drily witty sense of humour about itself, and I would've liked to see the more divergent choices it makes with regards to the genre, its metaphysical musing on the player's role in this indeed strange realm, and whether or not the gameplay ever progresses beyond basic gunplay and switch puzzles. I'm not necessarily expecting an Evoland-style deconstruction of several decades of FPS evolution, where after one sudden moment all the enemies are polygonal and the health pick-ups are replaced with regenerating shields, but I'd have liked to have seen what else the game had in store. Maybe I'll pick this up again when I have something that can run it.

• Quality: 3 Stars.*
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.