Any hardcore adventure gamer will automatically jump 3 feet into the air when you mention Beneath a Steel Sky.
Let's go back to 1994, the age when VGA graphics were pimp, and game developers only focused on the quality of their games. The age where adventure games were at their peak.
Any hardcore adventure gamer will automatically jump 3 feet in the air when you mention Beneath a Steel Sky. It's a classic in every aspect of the word. The game tells the story of Robert Foster, who as a boy was taken to a barren, tribal land called the Gap. He lives his whole childhood in the Gap, his family and friends are in the Gap, and everything he knows is in the Gap. Many years later, as a young adult, everything he's ever known is taken from him in an instant, when an officer from the corrupted city named Reich comes to take him away. Reich and his men kill Foster's tribe and destroy everything, and take him away in a chopper. Luckily for Foster, the chopper crash lands, and he manages to escape into a factory. Now, armed with nothing but his trench coat and a computer chip containing his robot friend Joey, Foster must find his way out of the city and back to the Gap.
As the story unfolds, you will meet a mass of quirky and entertaining characters, who are acted out beautifully in a diverse range of accents and dialects. The writing is also absolute genius, each conversation is filled with satirical humor and witty remarks, and also ties in with the atmosphere of the game and storyline very well. Foster's robot friend Joey will mock him whenever he does something wrong, or really does anything at all.
Not much can be said about the game's graphics. What am I supposed to say? The game was made in 1994, it's a point and click adventure game with VGA style graphics. No 3D amazing bump maps and particles and bloom. Just rich, colorful detail everywhere you look. Technically, the graphics, don't look realistic at all, but why should they? Artistically, the game is beautiful. The streets are cluttered with disgusting goo, trash, and other forms of human waste. As you move down in the city, everything becomes less and less run down looking, but still maintains sort of a depressing feel. Like you're trapped, and even though everything looks pretty, you're still a prisoner and can never ever leave. The core of any adventure game is always going to be logic, and puzzles. That's what adventure games are made for, to solve the character's problems for them in the most eccentric way possible. Well the puzzles in Beneath a Steel Sky are logical, yet not too headache inducing, quirky, funny, and move the story along perfectly. If you play through BaSS without a walk-through for the first time, it would probably take a good 10 to 15 hours to complete, depending of course on the skill of the adventurer. All in all, Beneath a Steel Sky can only be summed up in one word: Masterpiece. If you're a hardcore adventurer, you've most likely already played it. Play it again, just for me. If you're interested in adventure games, play it, it'll be the best adventure gaming experience you'll probably ever have. In fact, if you interested in ANY kind of gaming, give Beneath a Steel Sky a run, because if you don't, you're missing out on a classic.
(Beneath a Steel Sky was released as abandon-ware recently, and can be downloaded and played for an emulator called ScummVm.)