Beneath A Steel Sky

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (21 Jan 2003) – Amiga

If at first you don’t succeed…. Lure of the Temptress wasn’t a very good game, but it did receive quite positive reviews – let’s just say there are and were games which are even more overrated. After that, Revolution Software took their time to develop a successor – and they succeeded in a brilliant way!

Robert Foster (named after the beer brand – I’m not joking!) came to the “Gap” (the polluted land outside of the huge cities where only outsiders and freaks live) when he was a child – his helicopter crashed and his mother died. A tribe adopted him and he doesn’t remember anything about his former life anymore. He has grown to be an adult, learned how to survive in the wilderness and his best friend is a robot called Joey.

Some day, another copter arrives, carrying soldiers. They’re determined to take Robert “home” and they don’t hesitate to kill everybody in the village to achieve that. Just as the copter arrives over the city again, its controls lock up and it is going down…. giving the lucky survivor Robert the chance to escape again – but now he is in the city, a modern Metropolis (not Superman’s city, but the one from Lang’s movie of the same name), ‘foreign territory’ to him! How can you get away from the security force? What do they want from you? Who is this ‘Overmann’? And what part does ‘LINC’, the city-wide computer system, play in this? Maybe saboteurs from Hobart, another city, are involved?

I must confess I’m not in any position to be objective about this game, because Dave Gibbons has been involved in it. I can hardly think of something which would get a game a bigger bonus with me! In case the name means nothing to you: Gibbons has been involved in some of the greatest comics ever, both as a writer and of course as artist. Most notably of course Watchmen as well as 2000 A.D., Green Lantern and more recently, he designed the logo of Oni Comics and he’s working on The Originals.

For this game, Gibbons drew not only the in-game background graphics, helped designing the characters, but also made an eight-paged comic which serves as an introduction to the story. Certainly not his strongest work, but for computer games standards, it is terrific! Funnily enough, the drawings come over better in the game itself than in the comic.

Game-wise, Beneath A Steel Sky is a refreshingly conservative point & click Adventure. It belongs to the very last generation of this genre, i.e. it is not using any verbs anymore, just left mouse button for ‘examine’ and right mouse button for ‘use’. With this overly simplified system, even beginners won’t get stuck for too long. Especially since puzzles are mostly logical. Only downpoint there is that sometimes you’re forced to do some pixel-hunting.

The story evolves nicely, your sidekick Joey provides some sarcastic humour, most places and characters fit in nicely. Not everything’s perfect there, either, of course. Some scenes don’t have a real connection to the rest of the story, they seem to have no purpose. Take the court scene for example, it only serves for a few cheap laughs, it doesn’t help the story to progress and it doesn’t fit the general athmosphere. Same with the pretty lame ‘virtual reality’ sequences. Sometimes, dropping additional ideas – as good as they might be in theory – is a virtue, too, if you can’t fit them in smoothly.

Beneath A Steel Sky is Revolution Software’s best game by far. Not before and never after this one, they succeeded to make a somewhat challenging (everything they did later is just a collection of empty screens with nothing to do) and also interesting game. Not only worth a look, but worth staying in everyone’s collection.

Technical notes: The floppy version consists of 15 disks, playing it without a hard drive is hardly possible. If you have this version, don’t try the built-in installer, because it has a bug which prevents you from installing more than the first disks! You have to copy the contents of the disks to your hd manually.

The better alternative would be to get the CD version (made for the CD32, but works perfectly on a A1200 or A4000 with a CD drive, too) which includes full speech in addition. The voices are well done, I just never understood why the Scottish accent is featured so prominently. But then again, the usual US-accent isn’t any better. The disadvantage of the CD version is that you can’t save your game to the hd. Instead, you’re give ‘level codes’ at some points of the game. Some sites mention the existence of a second CD version which takes full advantage of the AGA chipset, but I’ve never been able to confirm its existence – nobody could even show me a screenshot which contains more than 32 colours. That is why I think some people just stumbled over the CD32 version and automatically assumed it to be AGA, too. If anyone has this version, though, I’d be more than interested to hear about it!