This is must play for any point and click player. The story is great, the characters are very well developed, the music is nice, the writing is excellent, the puzzles are fun. The only flaws are some very minor pixel hunting (there are locks and slots hidden everywhere) and sudden, unexpected deaths. I definitely recommend playing Beneath a Steel Sky to any classic adventure game lover though. Just save early, save often and save on several slots. Oh... and beware of the hole!
The characters are well defined, the graphics are overall pleasant and it has some very ambitious simulation mechanics for it's time, but the gameplay is just bad. First thing to mention - the pathfinding algorithm is utter trash, probably the worst I've ever witnessed. Most of gameplay time is you waiting for your character to stroll around the room before finally deciding to obey you, waiting for other characters to get unstuck so that you can interact with them, waiting because your characters randomly walks away from the room you told him to get to. This is a gigantic flaw that constantly plagues the game and slows it down to a crawl, makes you wonder if every action you want to do is really worth the effort. The puzzles are badly designed. At first they are reasonable, but after a while you start having no clue about what to do and you have to start talking to complete random people that will unreasonably let you progress with the story. There's a couple of pixel hunting puzzles that, again, make no sense (cowbane I'm (also) looking at you). All of this, keep in mind, while the pathfinder slows down every interaction. The only real reason I think this is a two star game is for the very complex sim mechanics which, for it's time, where very, very ambitious, and I think they're the only reason I suggest at least trying out this one. Chracters walk around the world, you can give instructions to your follower, the interaction system seems like Maniac Mansion on steroids. But... it's barely used in gameplay, which is a big question mark from me. You can "ask" people for items but it's never, ever used in puzzles (except for asking items back from your follower) and only once the follower instructions are actively used in a puzzle (no, pushing a brick doesn't count in my book). I won't lie, I broke a promise I made back in the early 2000s to never complete a game following a walkthrough, but I just couldn't handle the late game crawling around.
