Just one word can change everything.
What if you had the option to change a single word in a sentence while reading a book? What if that one word changed the entire trajectory of the story, setting everything on a different path to an entirely different ending? This is the core concept behind Beacon Pines. This game is a storybook game where you switch words here and there to find the true ending. I first encountered Beacon Pines at a recent Steam Festival demo and was immediately intrigued. All told by a very enthusiastic writer, the hoopla of these children in a rural farm village couldn’t be more believably engaging. It has a pretty interesting plot, and Beacon Pines does a lot of what it sets out to do.
In Beacon Pines, players control Luka, a boy who lives in a famous town. At the start of summer vacation, Luka and his best friend Rollo are thirsty for adventure to kick things off, and Rollo said he noticed the lights of an old fertilizer factory that was supposed to be abandoned. The boy heads straight there to investigate, but in doing so he can also become embroiled in a widespread conspiracy that covers the entire town, ultimately leading to its downfall. With the help of his citizens, Luka must unravel the mystery of Beacon Pines and solve it in a way that results in the best possible outcome for everyone. , the main mechanism this is all built on is collecting charms.
Charms can be collected over the course of the story or by exploring the surrounding areas. Each charm represents one word. At certain points in the story, a blank sentence is given and this blank must be filled by one of the charms he has collected. The words you choose can dramatically change the story, and how your characters act and how you perceive things. The simplest example is the difference between fight and flight. Most of these options lead to bad outcomes, but all decision points that can lead to major branches can be quickly reverted to and reworked. Sometimes you can’t get it exactly, but you can usually get the charms you want for one branch in another branch. In this way, Beacon Pines successfully guides players through the order they want them to play without making them feel like they’re on a railroad. We also make sure we have the information we need to make sense of the scenes in the other branches.
Beacon Pines generally work well on Switch, with one notable and, frankly, very strange exception. Text takes longer than usual to fully appear, animations play at a significantly lower framerate, and returning to branching event selections causes noticeable input lag when navigating that menu. This didn’t happen in every bad ending of the game, and overall it didn’t ruin the gameplay that much, but it happened quite noticeably often and was hard enough. , the problem always went away when the game itself resumed at a fork. Another gripe I have with Beacon Pines is that the event menu felt a bit clunky and awkward to navigate. Other than these, I find it difficult to name any other major complaints about the game.
Overall, Beacon Pines is an incredibly neat narrative adventure game that feels unique in its mechanics. The stories and mysteries presented in the game world are a joy to discover, and the dramatic differences you’ll notice when hopping back and forth between the various branches will keep your attention on the game’s 6- to 7-hour runtime. I especially enjoyed the game’s narrator. If you want to enjoy a complex story with a simple delivery method, Beacon Pines is definitely a game to try.
