INTRO:
During this game's time, there was a lot of competition in the adventure game genre (which was then strong) to create stories that are not only riveting but also believable. The spiritual predecessor of Beneath a Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress, was once such attempt, with its use of an engine that seemingly has NPCs going about daily routines.
Beneath a Steel Sky attempts to build on its predecessor by making better use of the Virtual Theatre game engine, but it also unwittingly highlighted issues that the game engine has and which unfortunately affects gameplay too.
These issues detract from the game's story, which is a shame, as it was one of the better stories to be had in computer games at the time.
PREMISE:
Beneath a Steel Sky takes places in a fictional future, when corporations rule in relatively safe cities where individual freedoms are heavily curtailed. The price of true freedom is a life in the dangerous wastelands, known in-universe as "The Gap" for the chasms and canyons that run through them.
With this backstory, one would have expected that the game might have both urban and wild environments. However, there is only the former, which makes for a wasted opportunity. On the other hand, the very title of the game would have generated expectations that the game would be completely set in (supposedly) civilized regions of the game's sci-fi world.
Anyway, the game's introduction sequence tells the tale of Robert Foster, an orphan and the only survivor of a certain vehicular accident. Foster grew up in the Gap, under the tutelage and protection of human tribals who eke out a living in the hostile wastelands.
However, this ended one day when his mentor and adoptive parent received an ominous vision of Robert Foster being forcibly taken away from his home to a place with the titular description. This does happen, together with a tragedy/atrocity.
The game properly starts when Foster experiences yet another vehicular accident, to which he makes a remark that would allude to the mild wit in the writing of the game.
Eventually, he would be caught up in a conspiracy concerning the livelihood of an entire city, as well as revelations about his past.
CONSEQUENCES OF LACK OF WISDOM:
For players with more sense of curiosity than one of wisdom, the game would impart a very early and harsh lesson on the need to think carefully about Robert Foster's well-being.
(During this game's time, there were unforgiving puzzles in some adventure games, so said harsh lesson would not be a surprise to those who had experienced the adventure games of this era.)
There are obvious visual cues and verbal warnings (usually uttered by Foster himself) whenever he enters an area with hazards and dangers, so it is the player's fault if he/she gets Foster killed. For example, very large symbols that denote radiation hazards adorn a certain area in the game, so if the player fails to get Foster sufficient protection from radiation before entering the next adjacent area, he dies an agonizing death.
On the other hand, some players may want to get him killed anyway, if only to watch the animations. That the player can make a game-save at any time makes this convenient to do. There are indeed different animations for each possible fatal scenario in the game, though few of them are terribly gory (though all of them are painful for Robert Foster).
If there is a disappointment to be had with the risk and occurrence of Robert Foster's death in this game, it is that the game-over screen is generic and does not show the aftermath of Foster's painful deaths. Of course, this disappointment would only occur for people who get a kick from watching fictional protagonists die.
Although there are decisions that can lead to Foster's death and a straight game-over, there are no decisions that can result in a hung game.
ROBOT COMPANION:
Robert Foster is not always alone. He has created a robotic companion, simply named Joey.
Joey is, however, not always operational, due to amusingly perennial mishaps that cause him to lose body after robotic body. In fact, one of the first few puzzles in the game requires the player to find a new shell for Joey, which in its least physical form is a mere circuit board that contains its personality and memories.
Joey is a surprisingly advanced AI, being capable of discovering and making use of the features to be found in its latest body. The most important features however are analytical tools that let Joey investigate an object that Robert Foster shows it and inform him of its properties.
Showing things to Joey is an important part of many solutions to puzzles. This happens to be mentioned to the player very early on and several times again afterwards via Robert Foster's outspoken praise for his indispensable friend.
In addition, Joey is often a witty robot, making pokes at Foster's occasional lack of wisdom. The player may also be amused at Joey's remarks about its current body.
However, Joey's personal regard for its existence as a companion of Robert Foster is quite inconsistent throughout the game. At first, there is the impression that it is frustrated with Robert Foster, and sometime later, Joey is a resolute companion.
On the other hand, this may have been a deliberate character design, as an observant player may notice that Joey's personality changes with each transfer to a new shell.
MOVEMENT WITH VIRTUAL THEATRE:
In the marketing blurbs for the game, the capabilities of Virtual Theatre, which is the engine that powers the game, were mentioned a lot. It is touted as allowing NPCs to perform believable routines, instead of being rooted on the spot as NPCs in adventure games tend to be.
Some NPCs may be moving to-and-fro a couple of different places, doing different routines at either end. The distance may span across several areas, or occur within the same area where Foster encountered them for the first time.
That is not to say that there are no static NPCs. There are NPCs that stay rooted to a spot, but not without good reason.
Still, there are familiarities that the version of Virtual Theatre that is used for Beneath a Steel Sky has with other engines for adventure games at the time. For one, mouse-clicks have Robert Foster moving about in the areas of the game. This is of course expected of a player-controlled character.
His sprite can collide with boundaries in the environments of the game, but generally, he will calculate the shortest non-diagonal path towards the destination when this happens. This usually does not result in a pathfinding problem.
The same cannot be said when he walks into the paths of other characters that also happen to be moving about. These NPCs may also collide with other NPCs that also happen to be moving about, especially Foster's robotic companion.
When this happens, the game will force the A.I. scripts for the colliding characters to reconsider their paths, usually around each other. The collision of sprites is still manageable when there are at most only two sprites that are moving around, but where there are more, such as three (which are usually Robert Foster, Joey and an NPC), this can become an annoyance.
JOEY'S MOVEMENT:
Joey attempts to stay close to Foster most of the time when it is active. If it is close enough, it mills about, giving it a semblance of independence in its character. As much as the player would appreciate this little touch, this behaviour of Joey's can result in it getting in the way of other characters, though Joey will move away to make space.
However, that is not the only problem with Joey's sprite. Joey moves very slowly when compared to human/humanoid characters, and especially so when compared to Robert Foster, whose sprite is conveniently the fastest in the game. The player could end up leaving Joey far behind and have to wait for Joey to scoot over.
By default, Foster will call for Joey to come over when he has to use an elevator. The player will have to wait for Joey to get into the elevator, which can take an annoyingly long time if he is not close by.
If the player has left Joey far, far behind when Foster is using an elevator, Foster simply moves on. This may have been a bug or an intentional work-around to prevent Joey from stalling the game. Regardless, if the player needs Joey for a solution, he/she may need to backtrack to get Joey in the elevator together with Foster, which can be a hassle.
The game designers have noticed this issue and have devised a solution, but it only works with the first body that Joey gets in the course of the story. The first body allows Joey to rejoin with Foster wherever he is, with a strong excuse for this convenience. However, the other bodies do not have this feature.
Joey will not follow Foster into every place. Where Joey would not go to is not immediately clear. However, if the player has both Joey and Foster in the same screen as Foster walks into an area that Joey would not go into, Joey would utter a monologue stating that it would not follow, but without giving very good reasons for these lapses in its loyalty to Foster.
PUZZLE DESIGNS & STORY PROGRESS:
Most puzzles in the game can be solved via observation and logical decisions, which makes for a pleasantly fair challenge. There are a few pixel-hunting moments, however.
Some puzzles have solutions that only long-time veterans of adventure games would know. For example, one of the puzzles has a solution that involves some knowledge of lock-picking. Although some veterans of the adventure game genre may know this, the average person is not expected to, unless he/she happens to be an avid lock enthusiast.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to know where to go to next in order to progress in the story. The only reliable method to progress is to check places that the player has gone to in order to see if there had been any changes, and then investigate these changes to see if there is any event that can be triggered to progress in the game.
Some of these events seem more interesting than the rest. For example, there is a ghastly discovery that the player would discover when checking out a slightly creepy place that is filled with dummies; this discovery gives a strong impression that things are happening out of the player's control, which makes for convincing suspense.
A few other events do seem somewhat frivolous though. For example, there is one point in the game where the player must get involved in a silly and almost inconsequential court case just to progress.
INVENTORY & ITEMS:
Robert Foster has a trench-coat that he almost always wears. How he came across it is never explained in the game, though he and many other characters do make remarks on it.
Anyway, the coat is surprisingly roomy. It is where Foster keeps most of the items that he can nick, though he of course cannot carry around very large objects.
Accessing his inventory involves moving the mouse cursor to the top of the screen, which causes a tab to drop down, showing a row of icons that depict the items that Foster has. This was not anything new during the time of Beneath a Steel Sky, but it is still a lot more convenient than bringing up a dedicated inventory screen.
Anyway, not all items that the player finds are useful. Some of them are red herrings, though they are not without some entertainment value. They will be removed in one way or another, and whenever it happens, it is usually a slightly witty occurrence.
Bringing the cursor over an item in the inventory and selecting it will bring up a text description of the object, possibly provided by Foster. However, for more information, the player may want to show it to Joey, as mentioned earlier. For objects that are on-screen and in the environment, only Foster will provide the description when it is examined.
Foster's and Joey's descriptions of objects are mostly helpful, but the relevance of certain information may not be immediately apparent to every person. For example, there is one object that Foster would describe as having a "safety device". Players who are versed in mechanical tools would know what it does in the context of the function of the object that Foster describes, but other players would be wondering what it meant.
Some of Foster's descriptions of objects happen to be tongue-in-cheek pokes at technology that were prevalent during the game's time. For example, there is a poke at VCR machines and their dubious reliability and lack of user-friendliness.
VIRTUAL WORLD:
There is a segment in the game where Foster takes a trip into a land of abstracts. There would not be a mention of this segment in this review if not for changes in the gameplay during this segment.
The changes in the gameplay mainly involve the use of Foster's inventory and how he – or rather his avatar - moves about the aforementioned abstract landscape.
In this segment, Foster has an entirely different set of items and the inventory system works differently. There is no tutorial for this segment in the manual of the game and there is no text description of said items either, so the player will have to fiddle around and figure out what does what.
However, this is a quick learning process, and one which may endear itself to people who remember the debut of the first few Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) on the computer platform. For other people, this would unfortunately seem to be a lapse in the user-friendliness of the game.
Foster's movement in this abstract landscape is also greatly limited, especially in one area where he can only move about in a grid.
The journey into and through this landscape is used in interesting ways to help Foster progress in his quest to discover the truth, though to describe more would be to invite more spoilers than is necessary for this review.
GRAPHICS:
Being a game made in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the game had limited graphics technology to work with.
Most of the visuals in the game are actually scans of concept artwork that the game designers had made. These include most of the backgrounds as well as the comic-book-like cutscenes.
However, these otherwise lovingly-done artwork contrasts greatly with the sprites in the game in terms of aesthetics. All of the sprites are made of clusters of pixels with lower resolution than the background, making the simplicity of the sprites look all too noticeable. This seems even more so if the sprites are in the foreground, such as in the very first scenario of the game where it starts with Foster's sprite being closer to the viewer than it would be in any other scenario.
There are also small objects, such as switches and metal pads that sometimes have poor visual contrast with the rest of the background, thus leading to pixel-hunting. This is even more of a problem if the player is playing in windowed mode (which can be done if the player is playing the GOG version of the game).
On the other hand, the sprites are still detailed enough to express exaggerated emotions, namely pain (of which Foster tends to suffer a lot).
There is no apparent attempt at splitting the story into chapters, but there are significant visual changes in the scenery as the player progresses in the game. For example, the game starts with industrial complexes and skyscrapers to depict the stranglehold of corporations on the economy, and then progresses to a much more comfortable-looking stratum of living quarters that while adequate for purposes of livelihood, are very wanting for space.
WRITING:
According to revelations by the game designers a long time after the release of the game, the writing for Beneath a Steel Sky was the result of a compromise between two lead designers who had differences over the seriousness and wit of the dialogues in the game.
The result is that there are scenes that are deadly serious, interspersed with light-hearted moments. Most of the latter involve conversations between Foster and Joey, which help express the personalities of both characters.
The other characters in the game are less memorable, but only because they do not get as much screen-time as Foster and Joey. That is not to say that they are not without character, but some of their personalities can seem heavily stereotypical.
For example, security officers in particular are often depicted as incompetent, abusive and indifferent. Perhaps this was deliberate, in order to project the dystopian settings of the game. Unfortunately, this made it harder to appreciate their other characteristics, such as the thick accents of the security officers.
There are plenty of optional dialogue lines that highlight the mostly believable and sometimes funny writing for the game. The ones that are not funny still manage to add some character to the fictional people that are in the game, even if they turn out to be quite unimportant.
For example, there is a dialogue with one certain character about his finely-laminated clipboard, which would have seemed inconsequential to most players if they did not notice that there are few other clipboards to be seen in the game.
There may be some minor holes in the story-writing. For example, after having tricked a certain character that works in a factory into believing that Foster is a safety inspector, Foster can ask many questions that more than suggest that he is not who he claims to be. Another example is that a certain character would update the authorization details on an ID card that Foster has stolen without knowing that said ID is stolen.
Of course, one can argue that in any of these cases, the other person is not much brighter than Foster is, but that would mean that a lot of characters in Beneath a Steel Sky are rather witless.
VOICE-OVERS:
Most of the voice-overs in the game are decent, but unfortunately the less-decent ones include that of Foster's. Sometimes, his voice actor delivers lines with enough inflection in his enunciations to sound convincing, but at other times, he is just reading from the script, especially during less tense moments.
The biggest complaint about the voice-overs is that they frequently mismatch with the subtitles. Another major complaint is that the game sometimes fails to fetch the sound clips for voice-overs.
Even when it does, the game takes a while to fetch the sound clips that make up consecutive dialogue lines, resulting in awkward pauses from characters.
MUSIC:
Dave Cummins, who is one of the writers for the game, is also the main composer of the music in Beneath a Steel Sky.
For the most part, his tracks have catchy tunes, such as one that plays in a dingy exclusive club. However, some of the tracks are out of place with the themes of the game, such as a cheery soundtrack for screens where the backdrops are depressively dull.
Yet, there are tracks that sound very appropriate for the occasion. The most memorable one happens to play in the aforementioned virtual landscape.
SOUND EFFECTS:
There can only be a few sources of sounds in any one screen. This usually includes the music, a voice-over and a periodic ambient sound, which may or may not be present. These ambient sounds are usually associated with machines, such as the (useless) machine press that appears early in the game. They can be grating and repetitive, though to give the game the benefit of the doubt, the game did have limited audio technology to work with during its time.
OTHER COMPLAINTS:
Sometimes, temporary freezes may occur when the game attempts to fetch files and code for the story to progress.
Another complaint is that if NPCs are performing animations when the player wants Foster to talk to them, the player has to wait for them to complete the animations. This is understandable if they are doing work at the time, but not when the NPCs are doing something as frivolous as just looking at the floor.
CONCLUSION:
Beneath a Steel Sky has a lot of potential, but perhaps wasted some of it due to mistakes in its technical designs and voice-overs. Still, its flaws are not too significant as to overshadow its finer moments and its messages about the possible dangers in a futuristic world.