December 13, 2023 - Day 346 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 367
Game: The Pale Beyond
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 25, 2023
Installation Date: Dec 13, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 22m
The Pale Beyond is a survival RPG which appears to be set in the late 19th century; it's the sixth game in the December Humble Choice bundle.
You play as the first mate on a ship that's setting out to try and find what became of its sister ship after it went missing five years earlier on an Arctic expedition.
At first I thought it was a graphic novel. A lot of flat, hand-drawn graphics, and clicking to read text.
One line at a time. My frustration levels started to grow at this point. Eventually after clicking through all that text, and setting my character traits in the process (a "Muttwash criminal"), I found myself at the docks.
Well, more like found everyone else. My character is nowhere to be seen, which feels vaguely disorienting for a game that is split between barely animated isometric views, and first-person perspective interactions with paintings of characters and text boxes.
It has a touch of Frostpunk to it, without any of the things that kept me engaged, and ultimately I felt no desire to keep going.
An added point of frustration was that the game only saves at particular points, which meant that when I decided to quit, but changed my mind, I was actually back at the start of the "level", which would have meant clicking through all of the previous ten minutes of interactions again, which completely took the wind out of my sails (pun intended).
The Pale Beyond might be more suited to someone with an interest in survival games and/or 19th century nautical adventures, but I found it a bit: