Five years ago, The Viscount and its crew set sail into The Pale Passage in search of absolute magnetic South. The ship and its crew were tragically lost to the ice, never to be seen again. Her sister ship, The Temperance shall follow in her path, hoping to find answers where The Viscou...
Five years ago, The Viscount and its crew set sail into The Pale Passage in search of absolute magnetic South. The ship and its crew were tragically lost to the ice, never to be seen again. Her sister ship, The Temperance shall follow in her path, hoping to find answers where The Viscount failed.
You didn’t ask to lead this expedition but here you are: stuck in the ice, Captain missing, miles from civilization and everyone looking for you to lead. Manage your meager resources, balance safety and morale, make the hard calls and head in the only direction you can - into The Pale Beyond.
A polar exploration game set in an unforgiving frozen wasteland where you embark on a treacherous voyage across the ice and into the Pale Beyond. It’s a stunning yet harsh landscape that can change at any moment.
Every decision matters. As the expedition unfolds and the winter approaches, every decision you make will have a meaningful impact on the story as you navigate a way over the ice.
After the Captain mysteriously goes missing, you unwillingly take the position of Captain. You didn’t ask to lead this crew but here you are: stuck in the ice, miles from civilization and everyone looking for you to lead.
Keeping the crew and sled dogs safe, fed, and warm during an expedition is key for survival. Surviving the ice will matter little in the face of a mutiny, every vote will count. So keep the crew on your side.
Inspired by Victorian etchings and historic paintings of the time depicting the ice, each character and environment has been drawn by hand. The result is a unique artstyle with an expressive cast to see you through the cold and grim environment of the ice.
Published by Fellow Traveller®. Fellow Traveller is a registered trademark of Surprise Attack Proprietary Limited trading as Fellow Traveller Games. All right reserved.
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A well-written adventure with great atmosphere. Very tense but fair. The characters are realistic and grow on you. It's not impossible to keep all your crewmembers alive, but you may have to replay multiple weeks, and you certainly will be at the edge of your seat the whole time. There's some very interesting plot twists and turns at the end that add a lot to the story and make it even more intriguing. This is very much a visual novel in spirit, and I only wish it was a visual novel in code as well - it's beautiful and more dynamic like this, but there's so many branching paths I would like to explore and it's hard to stomach repeating scenes again and again without the 'skip' functions that a full visual novel would have.
A fun choice driven visual novel game with some excellent art. Taps into that fear of the cold feeling well.
The only issue is the autosave at the start of each turn (called week in game). If you feel like you made a mistake and you want to go back, that means starting the turn over, choosing the same dialogue over, etc.
Despite that, still a fun time, worth a try.
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.
This game is a good chunk of text but definitely worth it. There's a really nicely written, catching story here while the game itself is not too hard. Definitely recommend.
I kept thinking about the game in between having the chance to play it. The story is amazing, the gameplay complicated enough to keep you going, but not so complex it's frustrating. And the characters are amazing!
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