This Strange Realm of Mine

While all my fellow critics were busy facing off against Hell Knights and Cyberdemons, I was fighting my own otherworldly demons in This Strange Realm of Mine. This is a brand-new throwback first-person shooter that follows random people as they explore the many mysteries of the afterlife. It's a mix of poetry and psychological horror set in a world that looks like it was created in Minecraft. And even though it's not as fast-paced or exciting as Doom, you'll still be sucked into the genre-bending adventure and the constantly changing gameplay.

Forget life, because this is a game about what happens after you die. You play a recently-deceased character who is lost and bewildered, thoroughly confused about where they are and what's going on. We're stuck in what appears to be a castle or secret underground passageway, it's not especially clear. All we know is that there are enemies all over the place and your only weapon is a flaming torch. This is definitely not the afterlife that I signed up for.

But what starts as a quest through dark and boring corridors quickly opens up to become something a lot more interesting. Our complicated existence allows us to visit levels and worlds that tackle not just different moods, but also completely different genres. The dreary castle makes way for a bright and colorful stage where we jump on platforms and cut down trees. There's also an outer space stage where you have to repair the station, a wide-open ranch where we shoot down demented goats and even 2D stage where we smash mushrooms.

Despite dabbling in different moods and genres, most of the basics remain the same from level to level. A lot of the game boils down to navigating through mazes and shooting at bad guys with your pistol, shotgun and SMG. You'll occasionally have to find something or complete a secondary objective or solve some sort of puzzle, but most of the game involves you killing enemies while searching for ammo and med kits.

There's a vagueness to the story and characters that I actually like. We'll spend a lot of time at the Tavern Limbo between adventures, which is where we can chat with the friendly bartender and meet up with the friends you've met along the way. Between the different characters and paths, this is a game that is meant to be played multiple times, and the writing and dialog plays into that. This is one of those games that gives you a bunch of pieces and hopes you'll want to put the puzzle together.

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I love the riddle box approach, but didn't have a lot of fun playing This Strange Realm of Mine. This is a game with so many great ideas and concepts that it completely forgets to perfect the first-person combat. The big problem is that our hero is a magnet to enemy damage. It's bad enough when you're trying to hack and slash with a close-range weapon, but even the gunplay ends with you taking a lot of unnecessary damage. The problem is so big that the game had to balance the difficulty by adding copious amounts of heath kits, but that's more of a bandage than a solution. The issue is that the enemies are often too aggressive and have perfect aim, which makes a lot of the combat-heavy stages come across as annoying unfair.

It doesn't help that the stage designs are lame and linear. I like the variety in locations, but they don't do enough with them. The wide-open ranch basically has one building to interact with, the space station is tiny and that 2D side-scroller we talked about is barely part of the game. There's a feeling that the game wants to rush through each of these locations in order to show you everything it has before you lose interest. This Strange Realm of Mine would have benefited by slowing down and giving us more to do in each stage. That would have not only made each location more memorable, but also help the twists and turns at the end land with more of an impact. Little things like that would have made this game a whole lot better.

This Strange Realm of Mine is a mixed bag of a game, offering both surprises and disappointments. While I dig the overall personality and find the concept of jumping between tonally different planes of existence to be intriguing, I was frustrated by the simplistic level designs and the crummy first-person combat. There's definitely something to this concept that I would like to see fleshed out, but Doomster Entertainment's newest game is in too big of a hurry to be fully satisfying.