This Strange Realm Of Mine at first glance looks like yet another retro boomer shooter (at least it's not another 2D retro pixel platformer) but really that's just a wrapper for a bunch of "I'm 14 and this is deep" quotes and rambling misinterpretations of "edgy" philosophers, to the extent I'm pretty sure the developer is a regular feature on Reddit's /r/iamverysmart subreddit for lambasting people whose sole existence revolves around bragging about how smart they are. Needless to say this head shoved up rear-end pretentiousness does nothing but remove value from an already mediocre boomer shooter... and this costs more than the OG DooMs, Quakes and Wolfensteins of the world, despite being a vastly inferior product. So you know how my final recommendation is going to go.

There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not watch hours of garbage intersituals.

On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.

The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets with crap 2D retro pixel "art" textures on them, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. This very poor quality visual style is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, worse, it doesn't authentically recreate the 1990's vibe the developer is hoping people will accept instead of doing their job properly, and that's just another reason to avoid it.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

This Strange Realm Of Mine didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for killing 50 pixelcrap enemy philosophers/monsters, trivial to get, but less than 36 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

This Strange Realm Of Mine has the ridiculous price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Dead by Daylight", "Alien: Isolation" or "Lethal Company". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.