Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)

So, if you're like me and you received this for free from GOG it's more than worth the time put in. It's an old school point-and-click adventure game and all the functionality of that era has been preserved. So you have to press F5 to bring up the menu. There's very little customization or interactivity, and there's no such thing as autosaving, so watch out for that. Especially around the end of the game where there are a handful of situations where you can "die." The game is relatively short if you cheat when you get stuck like I did. Only a handful of areas comprise the entire experience but if you're trying to figure out what to do next, you'll know each of these rooms like the back of your hand. The writing is surprisingly good, but the voice acting is pretty terrible across the board. Also, I don't understand why so many gamers obsessed with the "classics" rag on modern video games for being too cinematic, since so many adventure games I've played from this era are really just trying to figure out ways to trigger more story cutscenes. Also, it does that adventure game thing where some of the solutions just seem really obtuse, and it also does that adventure game thing, where you have to combine items in order to progress at one point, but it's the only time in the game you ever need to combine items, so why would that occur to the player? In general though, I felt like the solutions are much more straightforward than some other adventure games. Within the context of the gameplay and the setting most of it works pretty well. I'm running out of characters to type with here, but the story is cyberpunk sci-fi dystopia and rips off of Harlan Ellison a bit, but has a really great tone and atmosphere throughout the whole experience. If this is already in your GOG library I'd say it's worth your time.

Classic point and click adventure at its finest.

There is something about this game that is unique it does suffer from some quite obtuse puzzles (which admittedly i looked up a walkthrough for after hours of trying everything with everything) All in all the story is interesting and the world something different to what you will see elsewhere.

"Beneath a Steel Sky" is a very old game dating back to 1994, but it is definitely no worse than its more modern siblings. It is a sci-fi story with cyberpunk influences and that is exactly what I like. Set in a far future Australia, the game centers around Robert Foster, who is kidnapped by security forces and forcefully brought to the Union City (former Sydney). Your job as Robert is to evade an untimely demise and find out their motives. Now I have to say I love point'n'click games (The Longest Journey and Syberia being two of my favourites) so I dove straight into the game and got a very pleasant experience. Both Robert and his pet robot Joey are very funny and there are lots of other interesting characters that make you chuckle. Setting is varied (despite the fact that there are not many areas to explore and I felt urgency about Robert's quest to find the elusive truth. So what are the shortcomings. First of all puzzles. I'm not a very hardcore adventure gamer that spends days to solve a hard puzzles and mainly play games for their story. Now I found BASS puzzles to be on the medium-hard level. Unlike TLJ and Syberia were I found them very intuitive and easily solved by careful thinking, BASS's puzzles left me lost and confused a few times and there was an unexpected amount of pixel-hunting. Also while the story was very engaging I for the most part couldn't suspend my disbelief in a few areas. First of all Robert doesn't even hide he is a wanted fugitive and babbles about that to anyone who deigns to listen. Any secret service agent with more then three grey cells in his skull would have caught him ten minutes into the game. Secondly, Robert has grown in a desert among primitive tribes-people and not only he isn't surprised by some of the technology in the City, no,sir, he quotes Isaac Asimov and his laws about robotics. And finally my third quibble is that the game uses left mouse button for examination and right button for execution and I have found no way to reverse that. This is a first game I have seen such control scheme in and it is very counterintuitive after playing many point'n'clicks with different controls. All in all, BASS is a worthy game to play and it is free, plus I didn't feel that its few shortcomings ruined it in any significant way.

Several years ago, I was very fond of two things: dystopias and point'n'click adventures. Naturally, I'd decided to play Beneath a Steel Sky, which was a free, well-received dystopian cyberpunk point'n'click adventure. How could I resist? I downloaded it, started to play, but for whatever reason dropped it in the middle. Yesterday, browsing through my backlog, I decided to finish it at last - and now, after the credits, I understand why I dropped it back then - it just wasn't good. Beneath a Steel Sky has an amazing introduction (especially in the floppy version) and a quite good final part, but the game sandwiched between them is incoherent and just not very good. It's literally like a closed sandwich. The game switches from one style to another, tries to be funny and dead serious/dramatic at the same time and overall doesn't make justice to its plot and universe. Even the final part is far from flawless. There are a lot of cheap deaths in this part of the game, and if you will try to avoid them, you'll miss important bits of the story. The ending is anti-climatic - not in the good, Monkey Island 2 way, but rather in an unfinished Curse of Monkey Island way. And the "Virtual Theatre" system, which gave the NPCs the ability to walk and function freely and worked so awesome in Lure of the Temptress, feels sloppy and inappropriate here. So, in addition to "save games", we have "speed slider games": you will really need to tinker with the game speed slider to skip the long off-screen NPC animations/movements or to pass through quite bad timed sections. If you still want to play the game, don't use the GOG version. Revolution Software liberated the floppy version too (while GOG one is CD/talkie one). The original lacks digitised and narrated Dave Gibbons' comic (which you should read anyway, as well as security manuals) but also lacks very hit-and-miss voice acting and butchered intro sequence of CD version.