Hello all,
I had wanted to tell you all about the experiences I had with the two games I played last week, the The Outer Worlds and Beyond a Steel Sky.
I had written a text about it but it is becoming so long that I think a lot of people would not even want to start on it because of its length.
As most people here already know about The Outer Worlds I think I could better just tell about BYASS instead. I do need to ad that I do compare TOW and BYASS's themes with another and their settings, and why I think one of them is much better than the other.
I could alter these lines but I have already spend too much time on this and I just want to post it.
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Almost twenty years ago I bought Beneath a Steel Sky, an adventure game that was already seven or eight years old at that point I think.
As I was still somewhat of a point and click adventure fan at the time, the genre and gameplay being one of the things that got me into PC gaming, I really wanted to play this game as reviews in magazines were pretty positive about it.
And I did in general enjoy the game, it had a cool setting and an interesting story though in some ways it felt somewhat smaller and shorter than some of the other similar adventure games by other companies at the times, and the final part of the game was somewhat disappointing as it felt rushed.
When a couple of years ago a sequel was announced and that people that worked on the previous game would come back on this game such as Dave Gibbons from Watchmen fame who did a lot of the background art, I was of course immediately interested though it had been a while since I had played a pure adventure game. The genre kind of died out or became very niche as action adventure, FPS adventures, and more story driven RPGs became more common.
So it was rather frustrating when the game was first revealed to be an Apple Arcade exclusive for a while, and when it finally came to the PC that I could not play it on my current PC Fortunately that is now rectified.
BYASS plays a lot different than BASS which was a more traditional MI1&2 style adventure with a mouse interface. BYASS instead plays more like a third person action game in which the player directly controls the protagonist.
I have to say though that I in general have no problem with this method of control as with it also came some other positive development such as more open worlds/maps, allowing the player to look around and not just be limited to what can be seen on a handful of screens.
Another positive improvement IMO is that the designers may have realized that players have rather moved on when it comes to inventory puzzles (use objects on puzzle/give object to person). Instead a lot of puzzles involve using a special hacking device that can modify the programming of machines and robots, and even switch functions and files between machines that are compatible with this.
One frustrating point is perhaps that the designers decided to give as many machines in the setting these hackable systems, even the ones that serve as background objects. This can be quite confusing for players such as me sometimes as when I encounter hackable machines it gave me the idea that these would be part of a puzzle.
That is sometimes also one of the game's flaws. Some of the puzzles can sometimes be very unclear or players can very easily follow a wrong path of thinking like I had with a particular puzzle.
Fortunate one of the other improvements in this game is that there is a hint system that the player can access when they are stuck, providing several clues before outright giving the player the solution. Players are no longer reliant on a walkthrough someone has put online.
During loading screens the player is also given the current objective in case they have forgotten or it is unclear to them what they are suppose to do next.
The setting is still cool, a dieselpunk esque futuristic mega city build on what used to be Sidney, set in Australia after a big war between the United States and Europe devastated the old world and caused an environmental collapse.
The used future of the previous game in which only the living and working sections of the rich and well to be were in general nice (but still cramped), has made room for a more in general pleasant, Mass Effect citadel station like atmosphere, with only the industrial sections resembling what the city used to look like.
The story felt somewhat 'kinder and cuddlier' compared to the first game with only sometimes more darker elements. In the last few days though I did watch a walkthrough of the first game and it made me realize that in general the mood of the two games is somewhat on the same level with the horror of an inhuman threat being replaced with a different kind of 'horror'.
While everything looked nice and in general played very well, I can't say that the game drew me that in like its predecessor did, but it has been such a while ago that I played that game that I no longer recall any more.
Maybe in my mind I am rating it higher than I really did at the time.
The story in some ways just felt very bare bones and some parts of it are really not clear to me such as how the initial plot that drew me to the game connect to the overal storyline of a seeming utopia that hides an oppressive dystopia of a different kind (forcing the people to be happy at all costs such as using social status and even mind control).
In some ways I think a lot of the themes in this game share similarities with those of TOW but much better executed.
I actually might like the setting and the themes more than I liked the storyline itself.
I was left thinking that I would much rather have had an action-rpg or rpg set in this setting or that of its predecessor rather than the Halcyon System of TOW which felt so under developed.
Revolution, the publisher, does not do RPGs but I wish they would consider or that another development team would be allowed to develop a RPG based on it.
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If people also want me to post my thoughts about TOW, please tell me.
