I'll attempt to be as spoiler-free as I can as I write this review, but if Unreal Life looks like something you might be interested in by just the store page alone, definitely give it a go before reading too much about it.

First of all, I'd like to focus on what this game does extremely well: Atmosphere. Every area is brought to life with beautiful pixel art graphics accompanied with a pleasing soundtrack. I had to stop multiple times just to appreciate its meticulously crafted set pieces. And the world depicted in Unreal Life isn't just pleasing to look at, it's also refreshingly imaginative. There's quite a lot of variation in the areas and characters, and they fit in just right. It really is just like playing through a dreamy fairytale.

There's not much I can say about the story without spoiling anything, but in my opinion it feels like a short visual novel. It's not terribly deep or complex but I don't think everything has to be. While I do think some other games in this genre have more to offer in the story department, I also think that Unreal Life presents its story in an intriguing enough way for me to be able to recommend it.

The actual 'gameplay' portion of Unreal Life consists mainly of exploration and puzzle-solving. I'm generally a fan of both, but the way that these things were implemented in the game have some issues. The puzzles themselves aren't terribly difficult, and the game does a decent job at teaching you how to generally go about figuring them out. However, I didn't like how some puzzles require you to find and interact with an object in the background that doesn't show up as being interactable. Because of this, at the end of the game I had to resort to using a walkthrough to proceed.

Another minor gripe I'd like to bring up as constructive criticism: I very much dislike the unskipable animations, especially when moving between floors. These just disrupt exploration in a bad way. A better solution would've been to just let the player climb the ladder or go up the stairs.

Overall, Unreal Life is very much worth experiencing, even if it's just for the audiovisual pixel art masterpiece that it is. Definitely a solid package, with some parts outshining others.