FrostSaga? Banner Pyre? A new thing?
Fantastic. A strategy survival game that doesn't want you to get complacent, or maybe a deep visual novel that wants to kill you.
It takes roughly one lazy Saturday to crank out a front-to-back playthrough. If you enjoyed Banner Saga, Pyre, and the man-vs-nature aspect of Frostpunk, The Pale Beyond is probably up your alley, while remaining very much it's own special thing.
Plotwise, you try to keep a tentative rescue crew headed into the Antartic alive after the captain vanishes and things go very, very wrong with the mission. It's largely a worker placement and resource management game, where your margins run pretty tight, but it's also full of difficult bespoke choices to make. Where I think it shines best is in how the game represents the crew - there are roughly two dozen aboard, and each has very detailed and distinct character art, beliefs, priorities, ways of speaking, and ways they prefer to be spoken to. Some of the hardest moments (for me) are when you have an array of responses boil down to the same thing (not commonly the case, but it happens) but the way you say the thing affects the way the recipient receives it, which will have consequences down the line. Great stuff!
I'm no Shackleton. Five members of my crew died before the end of the game, but I believe I could have saved them. Can save them, if I try again. There's a wonderful branching save system that lets you be a purist and suffer consequences, or 'branch' reality from any point in the past and try again from there, so knowing in hindsight where I messed up will let me jump straight to that point instead of having to do a full restart.
As the story develops your options change - things you had presumed you'd always have access to are lost, opportunities not exploited are gone, new opportunities appear. It never feels like the game is being unfair or arbitrary, more like the nature of the crew's mission in such an uninhabitable space is pushing back against your attempts to survive. The programmers don't hate you, the cold and the ice hate you, and when everyone survives another week it feels earned. When they don't, you feel it, since each crewmate is, or rather was, a unique individual.
The juice of the game is excellent. Options swell slightly as your mouse gets nearby. Speaking characters become maybe 5% larger, their clothing slightly more vibrant. Paying attention to the ambient background noise or subtle shifts in the art will sometimes foreshadow plot developments. It will occassionally surprise you with one-off, bespoke interactions unlike anything else in the game. Lots of small, nuanced things that make it very clear what's happening, provide positive feedback for the player, and keep things interesting.
Problems? Some, all pretty mild. Removing a crewmember from a task can be a bit buggy, with their profile sometimes disappearing altogether or sometimes doubling up like they have a twin helping them. Backing all the way out of the menu corrects this, so it's not a softlock or anything, but it's weird when it happens. A few unique options slam your turn to a halt without warning, which is potentially lethal if you haven't added food to the mess or coal to the burner yet - that's annoying, but the save system means you can correct for it within four or five minutes.
The thing that Pale Beyond does that I think I love best is this :
You are constantly preparing for an unknown future, and the game makes it abundantly clear that it's going to throw suckerpunches. You're making intelligent, reasoned decisions in staffing, who takes what risks, how to deal with each individual crewmember, where and when to be tightfisted or generous, and how that's all going to ultimately be tested is this vast known unknown (at least on the first playthrough). There are obvious ways to fail, and you're constantly juggling slim margins to keep ahead of all the ways things can go south that you know about, but because of the way the game keeps upsetting the apple cart in a barely-fair but gripping manner you can find yourself cursing or cheering when a decision that you made (or the emergent results of a series of decisions you've made) come(s) to fruition in a decisive moment you could only now, in hindsight, have seen coming.
Lots of this type of video game feel like a digitized Eurogame - you're making decisions to maximize your output within the context of a known game economy. The Pale Beyond is that, but it keeps throwing expansion packs into the game, and sometimes loses pieces or introduces house rules, and you're also playing D&D with a DM who wants you to win but isn't going to fudge any die rolls. It's thematically perfect for playing out the adventure of a team of highly prepared and competent individuals sailing into the vast unknown of an unexplored polar region where anything could happen.
I don't think The Pale Beyond fits neatly into any one specific game genre, but I hope I'm wrong, because if it does and I figure out what that genre's called I can go out and immediately dump my game budget for the next year on anything tagged with that label.
Is this helpful to you?
Yes
(9 )
No
(1 )
Report abuse