• Beyond a Steel Sky
  

  10 hours playtime

  31 of 32 achievements

I have beaten this video game, Beyond a Steel Sky. Got all achievements except for one which requires another playthrough.

Summary:
Overall I enjoyed it, it was a simple point & click adventure in a 3D format. There were many references to the first game in the series which I didn’t play, but I think all of them were explained in some way in dialogue or the environment so I’m not missing much. Puzzles made sense and were very easy so I was never stuck, the characters were likeable (maybe too much) and I understood everyone’s motivation. Except at the end of the game, where the reason and explanation for the plot’s existence fell flat in my opinion.

Review (I am not good at writing reviews):
The world was basic but likeable, a post-apocalypse where people live out in the wasteland or inside giant walled cities, where most of the game takes place. The city is a classic utopia where everyone has what they want, there’s no money, crime, and so on. Like always this isn’t entirely true, but I don’t think the game did a great job in showing it, the disillusion of the utopia was never handled fully and it’s all very tame.

Voice acting was good, with some clever or humorous dialogues, but I think most were quite dry. The main character has a permanent state of mundane interest, where he won’t express much shock, surprise, or true inquisitiveness, simply ask questions and give an expected response, apart from pivotal story moments.

Visuals were also good. It’s heavily stylised to look like a comic book, so a lot of flat textures and lighting, but it is pretty. World design was decent too, quite basic but not boring to look at.

The meat of the game are puzzles, which fortunately were enjoyable. I was backtracking very little and I never had to do any trial and error. Maybe they were a bit too easy, the only ones that had me stumped for a couple of minutes were a couple where I had to stand in a very specific spot for the character to be able to interact with something. Felt a bit like a hidden object game in 3D, not a mental challenge.

As for the story, it started out well with a mystery that needs solving. As we progress we get more clues that slowly reveal that mystery, which until the end of the game kept me interested and was believable. This is entering spoilers territory but not entirely: it is discovered the utopia requires a sacrifice of sorts to keep it going, this is fully revealed in the last hour of the game. But the game provides absolutely no reason why the sacrifice exists, it all boils down to “We have to do this evil thing to keep the city going. What for? Because we have to!”. All the characters, including the protagonist, simply take it as fact without ever asking for an explanation or reason. I didn’t like that, it strongly felt like the writers had no idea how to turn the initial mystery into something that made sense for the larger plot. It has practically no connection to what happened in the rest of the game, and just doesn’t make sense that everyone goes with it.

I give it a 6 out of 10, might play in a few years for the last achievement.