This is impressive; I have a few hours already invested in it so I feel confident I can give it a quick review. Beyond really feels like it bridges a particular gap between the classic point-and-clicks and more modern games that I wasn't even aware existed: By using very pronounced cel shading in a 3D environment with 3rd-person POV controls, it looks & feels like the perfect mesh between old-school PaC adventure and modern sandbox. The puzzles so far are very smart, not crazy difficult but so far they seem to need a little bit of instinctual poking around and some trial and error (the errors are forgiving, you're meant to progress). I just hit my first stumper at the museum trying to Free Joey, so I'm taking a break while absolutely refusing to look up any walkthroughs. 😅 Rating: A+ so far, this is exactly the kind of adventure game I love, bonus points to Beyond for keeping that unique spin on cyberpunk that started with Beneath.
I love point-and-click adventure games, but I certainly haven't played all of them. It is still safe to say for me that The Longest Journey will never fall out of my top 3 greatest of all time. The storyline is epic, the plot twists are not easily predicted (especially at the end of the journey), the dialog is smart (and not for kids), there is tons of information to gather, and lots of intriguing mysteries to solve with over a dozen chapters. I've played through The Longest Journey several times over the years, and I gain more appreciation for everything it got right each time. The only down-points I would give it are that it needs that little police station fix-patch to keep the game from crashing, and some of the puzzle solutions in the early chapters are bogglingly silly. I challenge that absolutely no-one figured out how to get that key by logical deduction. You looked it up or someone told you. ;) But these cons do not detract from the full experience, which is a very well-told, well-acted, beautiful game.
