And, there are a lot of items that you can read a description of, giving the world that much more atmosphere. Now, there’s still plenty of areas to explore, even though many of them are pretty small and, well, desolate in terms of interactables, NPCs, and a largely absent soundtrack (I even turned up the individual volume for the music but rarely heard it, to my surprise). I’m not sure how to better address this really, but the player is apt to run into a lot of invisible walls for areas that you would expect to be able to get to. I struggled with bumping into numerous invisible walls, for example. On the other hand, there are some things about BD that significantly detract from the experience. There’s a lot to unpack as you play through BD, and lot of questions arise about some high level sci-fi and philosophical things, and the the devs did a nice job of diving into that.Įxcellent visual perspective, art, strong story and good characters and dialog, and classical point-and-click adventure puzzle design makes up the core positives of BD. There’s an inventory system, branching dialog in which players can take different attitudes towards NPCs from aggressive to kind, and even a small currency system in-game so that Mark can purchase items to advance the story. You’ll travel across several major hubs with lots of smaller areas within, visiting all kinds of cool places and speaking to these creative characters, all in the name of solving puzzles to get back home. One of your companions, a failed military experiment robotic/drone dog that has emotions (but lied to the military about having them), is another interesting and offbeat character that players get to interact and travel around with. Many of these are creepy-looking or sounding, and everything from organic life forms (though almost no humans) to cyborgs and bugs and creatures that had lived multiple lives - there’s a lot of creativity and heart put into making a really interesting game world. I was impressed at how The Brotherhood kept introducing compelling new areas to explore and lots of wild looking and sounding characters. I’m not going to try to explain the story because it’s one that unfolds very nicely as you play through the roughly 10 hour adventure, and it’s written well enough that you should get to experience it for yourself. Mark’s new quest therefore becomes to restore his timeline and get back home. Suddenly, they’re taken to the future, in another time and space, with the world having once again undergone tremendous change, this time on an apocalyptic scale. The duo make it there, but soon after, security drones capture them. They manage to pull this off one night when storms are expected and a lot of the guard of the Penrose is set to be off duty. He decides to take a helicopter to board the Penrose, which is illegal, but he enlists the help of his older brother and former marine pilot Don to fly him there. Mark, an investigative journalist, is not convinced that their intentions are all good, and has to know more about what this thing is, how it suddenly appeared one night in the skies above South Africa, and who’s behind it. It also brought with it the uprising of an entity known as the Penrose Alliance, a massive corporation of tech and military might. The strange entity that appeared in the sky remains, but it brought with it massive upgrades in tech for the world, including medical advances that Mark’s very leg was aided by via a sort of exoskeleton brace. The story fast-forwards ten years and things are much different across the world. A car wreck ensues, killing the fiancée and Mark damages his leg. Your playable character, Mark, and his fiancée are out driving one night when suddenly a storm arises and something strange and massive appears in the sky. The game begins with a cutscene taking place on a lonely road in South Africa. At times, I felt like Beautiful Desolation ( BD) bit off a little more than it could fully chew, but ultimately there are a lot more pros to this experience than not. Developed by The Brotherhood - whose previous work includes Stasis and Cayne - Beautiful Desolation presents players with a gorgeous world to explore in a post-apocalyptic adventure that blends deep topics such as time travel, immortality, human-robotic relations and dynamics, aliens, as well as more down to earth subjects such as brotherhood and family strife. When I first discovered it just a few weeks ago, I also realized that it was previously a PC-only title, but that it was soon to be released for Switch and PS4, the latter of which I received a review code for. As a fan of the isometric perspective and adventure games in general, Beautiful Desolation caught my eye.
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