Review for Beneath a Steel Sky - One of the great classics of adventure gaming

[Zyx]

This is one of the great adventure games from the golden age of adventure games. It wasn't as epic as the LucasArts and Sierra games, but it was popular enough to become a cult classic. As such, it probably better compares to the Guilty-series of adventure games than the A-list.

Developed by the company that is best known for the Broken Sword series of adventure games, Beneath a Steel Sky is a dystopian sci-fi adventure.

You start as Rober Foster, a survivor of a plane crash and then raised by a trive of aboriginals until a group of soldiers from a nearby city come and kill the tribe and kidnap you. You narrowly escape and fnd yourself in Union City, trying to find out just who is after you and start to discover that there is much more to your history than you knew. The whole backstroy is told in a form of a comic, which was also really cool for its time.

As its contemporaries, it is full of cultural references and humour. It is however much darker in tone. The game is rather long and the puzzles are sometimes difficult, I remember getting stuck multiple times when playing this game. One thing that I really felt that made this game to continue forever is vast amount of locations, you're constantly in a new environment, a new part of the city, trying to uncover the vast conspiracy that's trying to kill you… or keeping you alive?

The game features Revolution's trademark "Virtual Theatre" system so that NPCs act and move a bit more freely than in other adventure games in that time. Other than that, the game plays exactly like its contemporaries.

Like for Secret of Monkey Island, there is a "Remastered" version of this game available for the iPhone, but that game is not free. Through the hard work of ScummVM developers many of these old adventure games have surprisingly found a new home and a revenue at Apple's App Store.

If you get the game from Good Old Games, you'll also get PDF copies of the manual and a comic book inspired by the game drawn by the same guy who drew the intro and a little known comic book called Watchmen, Dave Gibbons.