Kabam's leftovers were bitter, but now with DECA on hold, it situates Realm of the Mad God firmly within the tradition of a fresh revival. The game experiments with brisk moments of pure reflex, bullet-hell glory, washing every frame with luminescent color, and seeding each realm with fantasy philosophy, and the gameplay with meditative mindfulness. Over 800 hours of gameplay, without including browser and Kongregate, I'd say I'd have at the very least over 1000 hours, it all looks very impressive, but does it actually bring anything to the table?

The game begins with the tutorial, but skipping it, you reach the beach, where you'll spend some of your first noob hours before getting a grasp of the game, you stand on the verge of a very misleading and cruel world, filled with bright colors but extremely high stakes, having to risk yourself every minute while you casually speculate about the feel of death. Is it like flying or falling? You look down on a land of high-rises and diffuse, varicolored light. The player's first real experiment starts here, with a subjective point-of-view. The camera sits at the centre of your character, before you set it to the proper way, off-centered, when the character is hit by a particle, it speaks with a slightly muffled and reverberating voice, as though hearing itself; "oof", it says.

After getting to level 20, the last level, the real game begins, having to max your character with potions, the character drinks it, and you get one more point of a certain stat, HP and MP being the most valuable, increasing it by 5 points each potion.

Once you get used to the game it becomes more of a meditative experience than game, intrinsic and trance-inducing, the screen illustrates the player's altered visual perception, offering a remarkably accurate rendering of a DMT trip, with the ceiling becoming a red-hued pulsation of fractally repeating ferns. Sounds grow warbly, as though heard from far away while underwater. A low mumble of conversation begins, though you are alone in the room.

Like much of Realm of the Mad God, it’s a visually arresting scene that does little to advance plot or any kind of story whatsoever. Hearing your character's scattered oofs while it trips throughout dungeons only underscores that potion use can scatter your thoughts. Your character's don’t appear that profound to begin with, and his pot-taking (and dealing) later appears as a refusal to join the ranks of players it calls “PPEs.”

Oryx makes clear he has deeper issues in mind, through Craig, a fellow potions aficionado. Craig asks whether the character has read the Book of Geb, and soon he’s monologuing about the Egyptian view of the afterlife. As this is probably the longest conversation in the game, we can assume it will have later relevance.

It does, because the character quickly gets shotgunned by Medusa. As its blood spills onto the floor of a grimy Highlands lava pit (in a realm named “Medusa” of course), he wonders, “She shot me. Did she kill me? Did she shoot me? I’m just tripping, that’s what it is. It’s the potions.” (Craig later makes explicit the connection, claiming that the body releases potions at death.)

[a distinct 'Dun, dun, dun...' echoes through the room]

Your character’s apparent death (and eventual fame-earning) further frees your game's direction, which rises through the ceiling and becomes unstuck in time. It follows you through your grief and anger from a disembodied remove. Its perspective removes any nuance from individual players; they all become head-tops and foreshortened bodies, save when the camera occasionally dives into the lower, material world. Often this means zooming in on a light source until it loses all definition. When it becomes only light, the game cuts to another, similar light, zooming out to reveal a new scene. This technique repeats many, many times.

Viewed from above, the characters become visually flat. Oryx amplifies this alienation through banal dialogue delivered with flattened affect, as though all personality has been burned away by potions of life. (Craig, especially, delivers every line as though he’s just waking up.) Without a strong sense of character, Realm of the Mad God becomes primarily an intellectual exercise, the wooden dialogue one of several enemies recalling retro titles. But the games’s intellectual underpinnings—its ideas—seem muddled. Oryx claims to have experimented with potions as visual research, and he supplies the rw nw prt m hrw (that is, Book of Emerging Forth into the Light (Book of Geb) as an interpretive framework for the game.

Neither of these influences has appeared in Kabam‘s earlier work, but Realm of the Mad God does share life a preoccupation with violent, rupturing moments. Here the most obvious break is your character’s death, which enables over two hours of cries from the player. Earlier, though, your Wizard was killed in a brutal Earth Smash, a scene you'll return to several times. With your other character’s death, you and your character became inseparable, nearly incestuous. This violence-spawned connection, the game implies, ultimately leads to your character’s brutal death—and incessant rebirth.

The muddled (perhaps clichéd) exploration of violence and repercussions makes Realm of the Mad God more like other bullet-hells than one might at first expect, but this is quickly polarized as you discover its permadeath condition, most bullet-hells are reliant on practice for perfection, with little loss for death, but in Realm of the Mad God, it circles around it, making permanent death and loss of character incessant every minute, every second, every dungeon, a mishap and you'll have lost what you worked weeks for. Life and death in this game are technically impressive, equally beautiful and filthy, polarizing and provocative. As for the end, players may not immediately understand what they’ve endured. Like a drug trip, the profundity here is ersatz: however maxed you are, whatever riches you're wearing, whatever Great Truth you believe you’ve attained, you can’t bring it back with you.

Kabam's leftovers were bitter, but now with DECA on hold, it situates Realm of the Mad God firmly within the tradition of a fresh revival. The game experiments with brisk moments of pure reflex, bullet-hell glory, washing every frame with luminescent color, and seeding each realm with fantasy philosophy, and the gameplay with meditative mindfulness. Over 800 hours of gameplay, without including browser and Kongregate, I'd say I'd have at the very least over 1000 hours, it all looks very impressive, but does it actually bring anything to the table? The game begins with the tutorial, but skipping it, you reach the beach, where you'll spend some of your first noob hours before getting a grasp of the game, you stand on the verge of a very misleading and cruel world, filled with bright colors but extremely high stakes, having to risk yourself every minute while you casually speculate about the feel of death. Is it like flying or falling? You look down on a land of high-rises and diffuse, varicolored light. The player's first real experiment starts here, with a subjective point-of-view. The camera sits at the centre of your character, before you set it to the proper way, off-centered, when the character is hit by a particle, it speaks with a slightly muffled and reverberating voice, as though hearing itself; "oof", it says. After getting to level 20, the last level, the real game begins, having to max your character with potions, the character drinks it, and you get one more point of a certain stat, HP and MP being the most valuable, increasing it by 5 points each potion. Once you get used to the game it becomes more of a meditative experience than game, intrinsic and trance-inducing, the screen illustrates the player's altered visual perception, offering a remarkably accurate rendering of a DMT trip, with the ceiling becoming a red-hued pulsation of fractally repeating ferns. Sounds grow warbly, as though heard from far away while underwater. A low mumble of conversation begins, though you are alone in the room. Like much of Realm of the Mad God, it’s a visually arresting scene that does little to advance plot or any kind of story whatsoever. Hearing your character's scattered oofs while it trips throughout dungeons only underscores that potion use can scatter your thoughts. Your character's don’t appear that profound to begin with, and his pot-taking (and dealing) later appears as a refusal to join the ranks of players it calls “PPEs.” Oryx makes clear he has deeper issues in mind, through Craig, a fellow potions aficionado. Craig asks whether the character has read the Book of Geb, and soon he’s monologuing about the Egyptian view of the afterlife. As this is probably the longest conversation in the game, we can assume it will have later relevance. It does, because the character quickly gets shotgunned by Medusa. As its blood spills onto the floor of a grimy Highlands lava pit (in a realm named “Medusa” of course), he wonders, “She shot me. Did she kill me? Did she shoot me? I’m just tripping, that’s what it is. It’s the potions.” (Craig later makes explicit the connection, claiming that the body releases potions at death.) [a distinct 'Dun, dun, dun...' echoes through the room] Your character’s apparent death (and eventual fame-earning) further frees your game's direction, which rises through the ceiling and becomes unstuck in time. It follows you through your grief and anger from a disembodied remove. Its perspective removes any nuance from individual players; they all become head-tops and foreshortened bodies, save when the camera occasionally dives into the lower, material world. Often this means zooming in on a light source until it loses all definition. When it becomes only light, the game cuts to another, similar light, zooming out to reveal a new scene. This technique repeats many, many times. Viewed from above, the characters become visually flat. Oryx amplifies this alienation through banal dialogue delivered with flattened affect, as though all personality has been burned away by potions of life. (Craig, especially, delivers every line as though he’s just waking up.) Without a strong sense of character, Realm of the Mad God becomes primarily an intellectual exercise, the wooden dialogue one of several enemies recalling retro titles. But the games’s intellectual underpinnings—its ideas—seem muddled. Oryx claims to have experimented with potions as visual research, and he supplies the rw nw prt m hrw (that is, Book of Emerging Forth into the Light (Book of Geb) as an interpretive framework for the game. Neither of these influences has appeared in Kabam‘s earlier work, but Realm of the Mad God does share life a preoccupation with violent, rupturing moments. Here the most obvious break is your character’s death, which enables over two hours of cries from the player. Earlier, though, your Wizard was killed in a brutal Earth Smash, a scene you'll return to several times. With your other character’s death, you and your character became inseparable, nearly incestuous. This violence-spawned connection, the game implies, ultimately leads to your character’s brutal death—and incessant rebirth. The muddled (perhaps clichéd) exploration of violence and repercussions makes Realm of the Mad God more like other bullet-hells than one might at first expect, but this is quickly polarized as you discover its permadeath condition, most bullet-hells are reliant on practice for perfection, with little loss for death, but in Realm of the Mad God, it circles around it, making permanent death and loss of character incessant every minute, every second, every dungeon, a mishap and you'll have lost what you worked weeks for. Life and death in this game are technically impressive, equally beautiful and filthy, polarizing and provocative. As for the end, players may not immediately understand what they’ve endured. Like a drug trip, the profundity here is ersatz: however maxed you are, whatever riches you're wearing, whatever Great Truth you believe you’ve attained, you can’t bring it back with you.