Years ago, when I was a young lad, I took an introductory course in human
physiology. The course being for non-majors, we never delved too deeply into
any particular subject, but one subject that stuck with me to this day was
human sleep patterns. One of the things we learned was that after roughly
three hours of sleep, a person goes into a state called Rapid Eye Movement,
or REM for short, indicative of entering a state of deep sleep. Knowing what
REM was, I find the title of this game, RHEM, to be very appropriate. Ok,
playing RHEM doesn't really put me into deep sleep, but it comes pretty
close.
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| What a surprise, more abandoned industrial buildings. |
The world of RHEM is a giant maze from which you must escape by solving
various puzzles scattered throughout the environment. You start in the
middle of this maze and work your way out in a psuedo nonlinear fashion. By
this I mean there are many puzzles that can be completed in an arbitrary
order, although some puzzles are required to be solved before moving on to
new areas.
The opening video at the beginning of RHEM takes you on a long,
uninteresting tram ride down a track into the heart of the giant maze which
you spend the rest of the game trying to escape from. This is an interesting
idea, seeing the different areas of the maze in reverse order, but it is not
pulled off very well. The postage stamp-sized video screen is so small that
it made it impossible to make out any significant features of the world, and
the tram ride went so long that I found myself zoning out completely and
possibly missing some important clues. So far, so bad. Eventually the tram
came to a halt and I got my first real look at the world of RHEM. Well,
platforms, metal, dirt, rust, and dirty water pretty much sums it up. The
environment is very dry and sterile looking, similar to what I would imagine
an abandoned desalinization plant to look and feel like. There are a lot of
walkways and building with no apparent purpose other than to add to the
enormity of the environment. While playing, the "abandoned factory"
environment seemed to add a sense of loneliness and emptiness to the overall
experience. This appears to be what the developers were shooting for, but it
had the unfortunate side effect of adding considerably to the boredom I
felt.
Movement in the game consists of either walking forward, turning left or
right, or looking up or down. There is no 360 degree panning here, its just
the old Myst-style slideshow. I never felt like I was lost or getting turned
around, so I felt this movement style was adequate. The world of RHEM is so
large that I suggest breaking out a fresh pad of graph paper to record the
lay of the land. This really helped me avoid too much aimless wandering in a world
where you can aimlessly wander for a very long time.
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