Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)

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.

This is a solid classic adventure from the makers of Broken Sword, however it is lacking the charm and polish of some of the best of that era and a muddled story + myriad bugs leave one slightly disappointed (even if it is free!). First, the good. It is free. It has a cool setting; sort of a mix of Mad Max and cyberpunk. Your character, Robert Foster, lives in "The Gap" a wasteland far removed from civilisation, before armed types arrive with orders to bring him to The City. En route your helicopter crashes and you find yourself stranded and hunted in a city with only your trusty but sarcastic Joey for company. Your aim: basically to find out what the hell is going on, who the hell you are and what the hell this is all about. Thus starts the game. Gameplay is of your standard point & click variety, with an inventory of items to use on your environment and various different characters to talk to and gleam information. One difference with most other games of this ilk: you can die very easily, so save often and do lots of seperate saves. Also, your sidekick Robot Joey can sometimes help with puzzles or information, though he has a tendency to incapacitate himself for certain chunks of the game, to much amusement. It must be noted though that this game is BUGGY. It is easy to break the game by doing a puzzle wrong, and sometimes characters don't do what they're supposed to. Puzzles are not too tough but it can be quite unclear as to their order of progression: some items and puzzles have no effect on the game, but there's no way of knowing this until you progress much further. Some items you use multiple times throughout the game, others you never use. Many of the puzzles are simply a case of interacting with your environment and don't require much thought. The story has a weird blend of elements: your character, Forster, is something of a blank slate. He knows his purpose in The City is something to do with his past, but he can't seem to remember much. There's stuff about a Council ruling the city with the help of a super-computer called Linc. There are Linc terminals throughout the game which you can access to learn a bit more about the city or manipulate your environment. There's even a few sections where you enter Cyberspace, which is visually interesting and cleverly done. There seems to be a lot of things going on and a lot of scope for a strong story, but as the game progresses the story gets narrower and a lot of the early detail falls by the wayside. Visually the game is good for its age, and the environments are colourful. The animation is pretty smooth and done with charm and wit. If you run the game through ScummVM you can up the graphics considerably (and also autosave), which helps with the pixel hunting. Ultimately this is a short but entertaining adventure, with some good writing and enough charm to keep you playing through some dodgy puzzles and an unfocused story. Worth a look for fans of adventure games but not of the same calibre as Broken Sword and the best Lucas Arts adventures.

Excellent game. Love the premise, the graphics, the atmosfear, the humour. Very quirky. Some puzzles are great, some are simply obscure. Puzzle's aren't as intuitive as Myst, and that's why it looses points for me.

This is a perfectly respectable, old-school point-and-click adventure game, with character death. Puzzles are typical of the genre in style, and fairly decent -- not obscure but not too easy either -- but also pretty few. It's just not a long game, and I felt the story suffered a lot of that. Generally, story is stock sci-fi stuff, as are the characters. The art is fine, depending on taste. The humor is a bit goofy, tending to the adolescent. In the end, I don't see what all the fuss is about. It's fine; a bit dated; a little bit charming. Nostalgia may make some bump up their scores, but that doesn't to it for me. It's not that deep; and kind of zany. Just fine, really.

Great soundtrack and art. Builds a world in just a few minutes that will have you fill the blanks, without thinking too much about it. The art also contributes to the great atmosphere that is both pleasing and scary. A game worthy of being picked up and played at random times of the year.