Third World: The Bottom Dimension

Playing this game from the perspective of both an artist and a gamer, I have a few thoughts about the experience: - All of the character designs are incredibly detailed and beautiful, which feels super unique and elegantly tied to the artist's Brazilian background. - The areas that you inhabit are incredibly dense, alongside the game as a whole being really badly optimised, leading me to pretty constantly use the "arrow" tool that shows you where you're supposed to go. This transformed the discovery of the spaces into a pretty bleak slog, simply walking from figure to figure, snatching up new parts of the story. - Although the majority of the game is walking from place to place, which I did kind of expect from a video game that's primarily an artwork (see LuYang's recent video games that have far less interactivity than this work) in the second area, Sòfo, there are several game elements, from dodging the attacks from a mini boss to jumping from rock to rock down into a cavern. It was a shame that these more game-y elements weren't more present throughout, although because the game did not run well at all for me, these game-y moments were a bit more of a struggle than they shoul…

This game is a technical disaster, never have I seen a video game so poorly designed in my entire life. - The game fails to utilise even half of my computer's resources, putting an unnecessary burden on my CPU. This results in awful performance. - The game maxes out VRAM after just minutes of gameplay, the textures are extremely compressed and obviously dont require more then the 8gb of VRAM on my card - One of the game's characters causes a nauseating visual bug when approaching them, this is extremely distracting and breaks any kind of immersion this game had. - The specs listed on steam are just... Wrong... You don't need 50+ gigabytes of space to run the game. - Multiple untextured squares litter the landscape As for game design, this game doesn't have any. I say this with 0 hyperbole, this is not a game, it's a test environment full of textures and models. - Navigating the space is frustrating to say the least, the level is not built with the user experience in mind, your character will constantly become stuck on dips in the terrain or poorly implemented collisions. - There is no motivation to go anywhere other than your constantly ticking down health pool that forces you t…

I was a bit wary of trying yet another art game, as those tend to be wonky to say the least. I am a contemporary artist and a game designer myself, and progressively have grown tired of seeing half-assed pseudo "games" that troll game mechanics that they do not understand. However, this is not the case here. One can tell that despite its technical flaws (the game is terribly badly optimized and would certainly not run on the recommended specs, I tried it on my laptop and even the home screen does freeze), it tries to do its job as being beautiful. The art direction is very beautiful and expressive, which at least would be what to expect from an actual art game. I am not too sure about the sound design. I also happen to be Brazilian and be a fan of LYZZA, so I was interested in what was coming by, unfortunately it’s not very polished and sounds are just superimposed on each other. As it is, this game is just a nice prototype with good text, art direction and exploring direction, but really does suck mechanically and technically. I do suspect that the ways art projects are funded (that is, with very little money, and very little time) is mostly responsible for this. Players must b…

good game if you focus more on the lore, extremely jank and poor from a gameplay point of view. fun fact, i got it to crash in under 10 minutes and refused to touch it after the crash. the rest of the time was spent trying to ♥♥♥♥ around in the settings because of how poorly optimised it is

Third World: The Bottom Dimension isn't a game, it's an art exhibition that's been dumped on Steam, presumably because the local art galleries took out a restraining order on the "artists" who had no other choice but to pay Valve $100 to dump this on Steam. All you do in this bit of software is look around some pre-baked scenes and reveal some narrative, which is cool and all and might even be awesome if it was structured as a game. It's somewhat irrelevant to discuss the quality of the art here, this is a game review, not an art review, and, unfortunately, Third World is not a game, which is really a massive problem. For those unfamiliar with what actually makes something a game, a "game loop" describes the interaction and feedback a gamer has when playing a game. Tetris, for example, has a game loop where a random block appears, the gamer interacts with the block to position it, and then the game decides if that finishes a row or not, increases the players score if any rows were completed, then gives the gamer another block to position. Counter-Strike has a game loop where a player seeks another player, tests their skill against that player by shooting them or being shot, th…

Interesting artgame with beautiful aesthetics