Memory of a Broken Dimension: melting brains, one level at a time

Sit a modern player in front of an MS-DOS machine full of classics and watch them fail to launch a single game. Now distort the levels, bend the sounds, design everything to feel chaotic, and offer zero help. The result is Memory of a Broken Dimension — Ezra Hanson-White’s long-developing experiment in playable confusion, built for Steam.

Mystery is one of the hardest things to design into a game. A few titles do it near-perfectly — Amnesia and Gone Home come to mind, each applying “mystery” in its own way — but most stumble into the trap of linearity, which deflates the whole exercise. So what happens when you remove the line entirely? What do you do with a game that never states its rules, gives no instructions, and offers no clues about your goal?

Take Memory of a Broken Dimension as the test case. Launched, it shows no introduction whatsoever — just an interface called RELICS, styled like an old MS-DOS prompt. Plenty of players never get past it. For those of us with DOS years on our shoulders, what comes next is… complicated. Loosely, it’s a game of exploration: chaotic, erratic, near-senseless levels that demand interpretation of the smallest traces, examining “objects” — glitches? cracks? errors? — from every angle. The solutions aren’t found so much as manifested.

The closest ancestor is Another World: Lester Knight Chaykin at his computer — except instead of landing in another dimension, you land in a damaged, twisted one, where you’ll see things that may not actually be there. Hanson-White’s own description of RELICS — “The Ring tape,” a dark rumor spreading through an increasingly distorted fictional network — only deepens the strangeness.

At the time, only a prototype was downloadable (by its creator’s own account no longer representative of the final game), but it had cleared Steam Greenlight with pre-orders at twenty dollars. The full game — DATA_Rift — eventually released in 2020, vindicating the patience of everyone who said: follow this one closely.

Official website and download: Broken Dimension