Original creators Charles Cecil and Dave Gibbons bring the same care and charm to this as they did to the first game back in 1994. The dialogue is shot through with humour in a similar, though evolved, fashion to the first game. Also, that fake ID he’s using might just implicate him in the conspiracy, too. With the now universally-loved JOEY missing for several years, Foster digs deep into a city-wide conspiracy that reaches to the upper echelons of government. You’ll follow a linear story, but are often able to travel between districts to refresh your memory on certain leads or apply knew knowledge or items to existing problems. Once you reach Union City it becomes a more open and complex game. It’s mostly quite simple stuff, and there are some serious red herrings thrown around that achieve nothing, but it’s often an invaluable tool. This puzzle in itself took me a good 20 minutes of exploring and talking, during which time I was also following up leads about the STALKER.Īfter this section Foster will also receive a Scanner that allows you to hack certain devices by altering their internal logic paths to, for instance, open a door when the person using it is flagged as unauthorised. To do this, you’ll need to find a lure to trick the bird to a specific spot and make it drop the deet. For example, in an early area you’ll come across a lass named Ember who can sell you a stolen U-Chip implant that will allow you to enter and move around inside Union City, but in order to get it you’ll first need to catch the aggressive “gang-gang bird” that stole her Data Transfer Tool, or “deet”. The classic point and click needs a real renaissance, frankly, and Beyond A Steel Sky testifies to this fact.Īs Foster, you’ll traverse a variety of enclosed 3D spaces interacting with a multitude of NPCs and devices in order to unlock the way forward and progress the story. Foster is a resourceful chap, too, able to store all sorts of goodies to pull out later and solve puzzles with.
Habitual hero Foster takes off in pursuit, quickly arriving back at the city gates with only his wits to steer him. However, tragedy strikes when his friend’s son, Milo, is taken prisoner by a massive walking tank called a STALKER and possibly whisked away to Union City with a bunch of other children. Having saved Union City (the metropolis formerly known as Sydney) from corruption alongside his now deified robot buddy JOEY, Foster has retired to the Gap (the barren wilderness formerly known as the Outback) to live among the simpler folk. Not that any of it really matters too much.īeyond A Steel Sky is a clever sequel, returning with the same protagonist and setting in order to appease the stalwart fans, but presenting a brand new story that fills in the background pretty neatly and then gets on with telling its own tale. I don’t remember it being set in a dystopian, far-future Australia, or that the protagonist Robert Foster is literally named after the famous blue-canned lager which, apparently, survived the apocalypse. I have images of the screenshots ingrained in my brain, even snippets of the dialogue, but upon booting up the sequel I realised that I actually remember next to nothing of importance. See, I remember playing Beneath A Steel Sky for years as a (presumably) spotty adolescent.
BEYOND A STEEL SKY MAC PC
Putting my own ouroborous-like self-repetition to one side though, the reason I once more draw attention to the human memory and its ability to be a big old tricksy bastard is Beneath a Steel Sky, the 1994 PC point and click adventure game to which Beyond A Steel Sky is the much-anticipated sequel. For example, I can’t remember which past review I opened with that same “memory is a funny thing” line, but I’ve definitely done it.
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