Beneath a Steel Sky

Set in a dystopian future, Beneath a Steel Sky is a point-and-click adventure made by Revolution, the creators of the Broken Sword series. After Robert Foster is orphaned after a helicopter accident, he is raised by a tribe of Aboriginals in The Gap, the Australian Outback. One day his foster father sees a vision of Robert being forcibly taken to the city; which comes true. After surviving yet another helicopter crash, Robert escapes and begins to uncover the truth.

Robert is accompanied by his robot Joey who can help with some tasks or give advice about items. Although taking place in the city, there aren't many NPCs and the game feels a bit small. Some NPCs can walk about as if they are doing their daily routines, but this can be annoying when you need to find them to progress.

From start to finish, the game suffers from being vague with your objectives and even when you read a walk-through, it just isn't obvious why you are doing these tasks. Near the end of the game, it suddenly throws in the ability to die, and it isn't obvious one of these moments are going to come up; so it becomes a process of saving often, then a bit of trial and error.

The lack of scale hinders the sense of adventure and the city is basically one multi storey complex so their isn't much variety in locales. Most areas only have a few objects to interact with, and sometimes the objects are so small you need to pixel hunt to find them.

The graphics were probably great for the time, but the small resolution really holds the game back. The voice acting is generally good but there are a few lines delivered in the wrong tone. Some voice samples don't even play, and some don't quite match the subtitles which means it is a good idea to have the subtitles on to make sure you experience all the script which is quite sarcastically funny much like the Broken Sword series. The music is very retro and cheerful, but the sound effects can be very repetitive and grating when there are mechanical machines making hissing and slamming noises. Given that it's my first play-through of a 19 year old game, I'm not biassed by nostalgia and will judge the game from what it is. It hasn't aged well, feels quite short (around 5 hours) and doesn't do too well in telling its story.