DownGrader
Member
Several years ago, I was very fond of two things: dystopias and point'n'click adventures. Naturally, I'd decided to play Beneath a Steel Sky, which was a free, well-received dystopian cyberpunk point'n'click adventure. How could I resist? I downloaded it, started to play, but for whatever reason dropped it in the middle. Yesterday, browsing through my backlog, I decided to finish it at last - and now, after the credits, I understand why I dropped it back then.
It just wasn't good.
Beneath a Steel Sky has an amazing introduction and a very good final part, but everything between is just plain, incoherent and not very good. It's literally like a closed sandwich. The game switches from one style to another, tries to be funny and dead serious/dramatic at the same time and overall doesn't make justice to its plot and universe.
Even the final part is far from flawless. There are a lot of cheap deaths in this part of the game, and if you will try to avoid them, you'll miss important bits of the story. The ending is anti-climatic - not in the good, Monkey Island 2 way, but rather in an unfinished Curse of Monkey Island way. And the "Virtual Theatre" system, which gave the NPCs the ability to walk and function freely and worked so awesome in Lure of the Temptress, feels sloppy and inappropriate here. You will really need to tinker with the game speed slider to skip the long off-screen NPC animations/movements or to pass through quite bad timer sections,
I don't even know if there are any good early-1990s point'n'click games which weren't made by LucasArts. I'm goint to play I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream in few days, and I really hope it won't let me down.
Few pieces of advice for people wanting to play this game.
- Disregard the CD version. The only things added to it compared to the floppy release were very hit-and-miss voice acting and digitized version of Dave Gibbons' comic which butchered the original opening. In ScummVM, you can force the CD version to use the floppy intro, but it's honestly better to just use the original release.
- Speaking of the comic, you MUST read it to understand the story, as well as security manual. Both can be found alongside the GOG release (which is also free).
- Don't use MT-32 emulation in ScummVM with this game - for some reason, the audio stutters during transitions between major in-game areas, and it's not like the soundtrack is improved that much by MT-32.
It just wasn't good.
Beneath a Steel Sky has an amazing introduction and a very good final part, but everything between is just plain, incoherent and not very good. It's literally like a closed sandwich. The game switches from one style to another, tries to be funny and dead serious/dramatic at the same time and overall doesn't make justice to its plot and universe.
Even the final part is far from flawless. There are a lot of cheap deaths in this part of the game, and if you will try to avoid them, you'll miss important bits of the story. The ending is anti-climatic - not in the good, Monkey Island 2 way, but rather in an unfinished Curse of Monkey Island way. And the "Virtual Theatre" system, which gave the NPCs the ability to walk and function freely and worked so awesome in Lure of the Temptress, feels sloppy and inappropriate here. You will really need to tinker with the game speed slider to skip the long off-screen NPC animations/movements or to pass through quite bad timer sections,
I don't even know if there are any good early-1990s point'n'click games which weren't made by LucasArts. I'm goint to play I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream in few days, and I really hope it won't let me down.
Few pieces of advice for people wanting to play this game.
- Disregard the CD version. The only things added to it compared to the floppy release were very hit-and-miss voice acting and digitized version of Dave Gibbons' comic which butchered the original opening. In ScummVM, you can force the CD version to use the floppy intro, but it's honestly better to just use the original release.
- Speaking of the comic, you MUST read it to understand the story, as well as security manual. Both can be found alongside the GOG release (which is also free).
- Don't use MT-32 emulation in ScummVM with this game - for some reason, the audio stutters during transitions between major in-game areas, and it's not like the soundtrack is improved that much by MT-32.