Beyond A Steel Sky
AS REFRESHING AS A CAN OF SPANKLES
It’s never easy revisiting something after a long time, and it’s been
26 years since Beneath A Steel Sky captivated adventure gamers.
But there’s always been a place for a sci-fi mystery with a good sense of humour in the gaming market
– the only question was whether Revolution Software’s sequel could recapture the magic with today’s technology.
Beyond A Steel Sky is set ten years after the original game, with Robert Foster preparing to move on from his home village in the Gap.
Just as he’s due to set off, a child named Milo is abducted and taken in the direction of Union City – the location of the original game. Having left his robotic buddy Joey in charge a decade ago, Robert finds a place transformed. But beyond the utopian veneer, something doesn’t feel quite right, whether it’s the LINC replacement MINOS, the insincere cheeriness of everyone you meet or the fact that Joey is nowhere to be found. What’s more, he has a problem – the dead man he found on the outskirts of the city seems to be connected to the kidnapping, and he needs to find out how.
First impressions are very good. Much of the establishing story is told via an opening comic sequence by Dave Gibbons. The in-game graphics retain this style and while they aren’t the most graphically taxing in the world, as you might expect given that the game made its debut on IOS, the pop-up speech and caption bubbles do sell the style well. The game is always attractive, with only a couple of slightly obvious low-res textures to spot when viewed up close. Background tunes are well-composed, but the voice acting is definitely
enthusiastic, to put it lightly. The dialogue is at least genuinely funny quite a lot of the time, providing plenty of sly nods to our own world as well as in-universe humour, and Robert provides an excellent straight man counterpart to the colourful cast of characters he meets.
The only problem is that to begin with, you won’t feel like you’re making any progress at all. Your initial task of simply getting out of the opening area and into Union
City does succeed in teaching you the basics of the game, including your first interactions with the game’s primary puzzle mechanic, MINOS hacking. When you activate your device, you’ll be able to see the operational flowcharts of any device within a certain range, and edit them by dragging movable blocks. If you have more than one device within range, you can transfer compatible blocks between devices, which may either solve your problem or at least allow you to move the attribute to a more useful place. However, this introductory area is perhaps more complex than it needs to be. Even if you exclude the various conversations you’ll have along the way, there are a dozen different interactions you’ll need to perform to pass this early section, and it does begin to drag.
Fortunately, once you get beyond that opening area the pace does pick up considerably, and enjoying the game’s positive traits becomes a whole lot easier. While new elements are constantly thrown in alongside the initial mystery, it never feels as if the focus on the task at hand is being lost – any secondary objective that sidetracks you doesn’t do so for too long, and always feels relevant to the wider plot. In true Nineties adventure game tradition, some of the puzzles are considerably more obvious than others, though you do at least have the option of consulting the pause screen for hints when you come across the trickier ones. If you do use that option, you’ll be made to wait for a little while before accessing more direct hints, meaning that you are still given the chance for the penny to drop.
Those of you who enjoyed the Nineties original will surely cut this sequel some slack for its more obtuse puzzles – they are part and parcel of the retro adventure game experience, after all. The voice acting may be more divisive, as it can get rather hammy. We actually liked this, as it suits the larger-than-life characters and comic book theme, but we could see how it may grate. The indisputable problems are mostly of a technical nature – bystanders blocking your path, the occasional moment where a camera is stuck behind a character during dialogue scenes, and on one occasion a missing dialogue box that required us to load up a recent save. There’s nothing catastrophic here, but it leaves the game feeling slightly unpolished.
If you’ve ever had a soft spot for classic adventure games, Beyond A Steel Sky will make you happy. Fans of the original game will undoubtedly get the most from this sequel, but it also holds up as its own experience – you’ll never feel out of the loop as important plot points are explained naturally and adequately along the way. The game does everything you’d hope in terms of balancing an interesting tale with tricky puzzles, combining that retro sensibility with modern presentation, and that’s not always easy. Hats off to Revolution for pulling it off.
In a nutshell
Slight pacing issues and the odd technical problem mean it’s not a perfect experience, but Beyond A Steel Sky is a solid adventure game that carries forward all the best bits of its Nineties predecessor.