The Pale Beyond

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.

This game gives me feeling that are difficult to describe, but I'll try my best here. On one hand, the story and the way characters are written instantly clutched onto me and made me want to discover more and more of it. But on the other hand... The game seems to have been crafted in a way that makes it hostile to that very idea. Not because the game's difficult, because it's not that hard. It's based on an efficient management of your ressources and workforce, so as long as you know what you're doing you'll be fine. The problem lies in the fact the game doesn't tell you anything about how to play. It doesn't tell you how to put workers on a station, doesn't tell you how much food you're gonna have to spend at the end of the week (until you have to do so, and at this point if you happen to not have it you just screwed your week and have no way of knowing it), you get research points but have no idea what they're used for, the list goes on and on. There is nothing that comes close to a tutorial, you have to discover the mecanics all by yourself and said mecanics are locked to certain chapters of the story. So what happens is : you start the story, arrive Week 7-8 realise that you're screwed because of something you should've done week 4 but had no way of knowing it back then. Add to this that there is no manual save, so everytime you end up in this situation you've got to go back to the week save and redo everything again. You want to progress in the story, but can't because the game is designed to hinder your very understanding of how to play the game, so you have to redo the exact same thing over and over again. In my first attempt I had to restart the story 4 times before I even reached week 9 in the story because I kept discovering mecanics that would've been useful to know from the start. The game is good, the story is good, the characters are good, but having to redo everything all the time simply because the gameplay hides itself from you is frustrating

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!