Beyond a Steel Sky Review: the return of a great graphic adventure – InTallaght

More than 25 years after the original chapter, it finally arrives Beyond a Steel Sky, a 3D graphic adventure that offers not only a recovery of that canon so dear to the British studio already author of the Broken Sword series (do you remember it? Here is our review of Broken Sword 5: The Curse of the Snake), but a restyling of it accurate and modern. The hours spent solving the well thought-out puzzles of this second chapter have proven us how much the graphic adventure genre can still be a harbinger of good design insights, aesthetic and narrative. And now we are ready to talk to you about what, without a shadow of a doubt, is much more than an antiquarian celebration.

After saving Union City from authoritarian drift and deposing his robotic friend Joey in charge of it in Beneath a Steel Sky, Robert Foster he decided to return to the Glade in order to finally be able to live in peace with his community. A peace which, however, is broken precisely in the opening words of this new chapter, when on a peaceful day of fishing a mecha quadruped emerges with a crash from the water and kidnaps Milo, the son of a close friend of the protagonist.

Although visibly aged, Robert still retains all the reckless spirit of the past, and therefore does not take long to track the missing child: a path that will lead him right in front of the gates of Union City, the banner of the futurist utopia from which he had taken leave ten years earlier. Under its metal sky, the megalopolis appears inexplicably immutable, as if it were stranded in a synthetic perfection, the result of technological progress which has been able to reconstruct the routines of citizens by offering them new standards of life.

Robert Foster will therefore find a very different Union City, in which the inhabitants always smile and seem to spend their time on amenities of all kinds, but where there is also the disturbing suspicion of an unspoken reality much less pleasant, whose murky mystery deepens precisely because of the events that led our protagonist there.

The creative forge made up of is also making its return to the field Charles Cecil And Dave Gibbons (well-known illustrator of Watchmen, Green Lantern and The Secret Service), the duo who in 1994 gave shape to one of the most fascinating cyberpunk imaginaries in the field of graphic adventures. In Beyond a Steel Sky the original bitmap leaves room for a subtle and inspired cel-shading, capable of tracing the light-hearted but incisive comic book attitude of the first chapter, and which goes well with the futuristic script of this new epic.

And after all, even here the world building speaks for itself and carries the message of a decisive social criticism in its dystopian staging. Retracing the footsteps of an artistic direction that still today evidently manages to achieve impressive qualitative peaks, the game world unveils the story of a perfect society, exposing all the contradictions with surprising effectiveness and placing the player inside a visceral experience.

In a desperate attempt to find Milo we will meet several characters, all characterized properly as in any self-respecting graphic adventure. These will give us very useful information on how to penetrate the cybernetic arteries of Union City which remains a technologically inaccessible bulwark for any foreigner and will also allow us to deepen the hidden background of the timelapse of ten years that separates the two episodes.

A period of time in which crucial events have taken place including Joeys disappearance, which is why it is advisable to have made the acquaintance of the original chapter before approaching this new adventure (even if its plot stands well on its own legs). Here too, in short, the narration plays a central role, and is exciting and stylistically well constructed, with excellent dialogue writing and flashes of humor that dissolve the otherwise pervasive tension of a frantic race against time. Net of some directorial stumbles that will require some more effort than the simple suspension of disbelief, the work of Revolution can be said to be satisfactory, capable of evoking nostalgic sensations to long-time players and bewitching even the youngest players with irresistible storytelling. In the course of his 10 hours of campaign the story becomes more and more pressing, composing the mosaic of a modern sci-fi thriller which however contains intact and perfect the winning formula of its predecessor.

In this sense, the Revolution branded production stands both as a very successful sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky, and as a virtuous tribute to the old glories of graphic adventures in general. AND although the plot certainly does not shine for originality, the narrative sector appears to be one of the main strengths of the title.

In addition to having to converse with NPCs to obtain essential information, the gameplay of Beyond a Steel Sky focuses on solving the inevitable environmental puzzles. From the vestiges of the point and click more classic, the Revolution team recovers a truly inspiring puzzle design, original and only in rare cases a bit cumbersome.

Thanks to the spatiality offered by the 3D setting, which masterfully adapts to the retro canon of the playful mixture, the resolution of the puzzles joins the exploration of the city, requiring a fundamental but never redundant backtracking. The latter takes place via monopod, that is the automated capsules that allow the movement between the different areas of the city center: a ploy that fully benefits from the speed of the uploads on PlayStation 5, canceling the dead times of rapid travel. An important novelty is the introduction of hacking: at the beginning of the adventure, in fact, Robert will obtain a device capable of connect to city systems to modify its operation.

Replacing the logical nodes of an electronic device to be able to view, for example, the data on a characters tablet, or even start various machinery using the lever of a toaster as a switch are just some of the possibilities offered by this tool, which contributes to significantly raise the caliber of puzzles, provided you have a good deal of lateral thinking. This, together with the discreet amount of objects that can be found and the rough but inseparable crowbar, extends the range of the puzzles to an even wider dimension 360 where intuition and observation skills will be the masters.

The result is a graphic adventure equal to the expectations it brings with it, satisfying and ingenious just like those of the great classics such as Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island (by the way, if you have lost it we recommend you to recover our review of Grim Fandango). The headlines brain-bending streak should not, however, be interpreted as a lack of accessibility: in fact, Revolution has made up for this with a brilliant system of optional suggestions useful, intuitive and never too explanatory.

Beyond a Steel Skys main flaw lies in its technical implementation. Although on the whole it appears visually more than appreciable, the graphic sector is plagued by a constant and annoying pop-in effect, various interpenetrations and too little defined textures. Added to this are the problems of the camera, which does not fail to frame the characters often and willingly inexplicably too close, and the sporadic but unexpected frame drops.

Fluctuations of a technical nature that certainly do not undermine the general quality of production, which as we have said reaches very high standards from an artistic, narrative and gameplay point of view, but it is also true that given the low demand in terms of hardware resources we would have expected a much more dignified yield. However, the sound design and the soundtrack remain of a good level, and above all the work done with the dubbing, available only in English, but with a rather accurate translation in the subtitles.

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Beyond a Steel Sky Review: the return of a great graphic adventure - InTallaght