The Pale Beyond review: compelling but messy arctic survival RPG

I made a new best friend when I went nowhere frozen on my maiden voyage. It’s survival cooking — noisy From penguins to dead sled dogs and, under dire circumstances, a sort of Antarctic explorer’s porridge, an unpleasant product of “sea habits.” As a person, it’s easy for me to obsess over whooshes, but as a staunch supporter of civilization, I refuse to give in to cannibalism.

I’m not doing an intense gastronomical larp — I’m playing pale beyonda survival-driven adventure that takes a page from the tale of a late 19th-century polar explorer, and perhaps more recently, the first season of AMC’s historical thriller Fear (in short, Based on the actual lost expedition). At first glance, it’s a simple survival simulator and hope the worst happens. Because there’s nothing positive to be gained from forcing a herd of soft and vulnerable mammals into an ice-bound hellscape that doesn’t want to host them. But really, what is a man without arrogance?

The story begins with meeting Captain Hunt, a mysterious old salt who hires my faceless character, Robin Shaw, as first mate on the Temperance. The task is to find Temperance’s missing sister ship, the Viscount. It’s clear that Hunt is keeping secrets, and once we’re on board it becomes even more apparent that the captain, beloved and respected by his crew, is in full check out. Templeton, a strained biologist who looks just like a steely-eyed draugr, seems to be the only one invested in finding it. When Hunt goes missing, Shaw has to take over the mantle of the captain, at least temporarily, to figure out what’s going on.

Time passes by the week, and Shaw is responsible for maintaining food, fuel, and perhaps the ship’s most important resource: civility, or morale. Exploring your ship will reward you with resource cards, along with items that improve your facilities and affect your courtesy. Shaw can assign crew members to shovel coal, scientists to make medicine, and more. As a captain, his primary duty is to “take orders”, as well as resolve disputes, take sides, and inevitably cause trouble. If a specialist (the only person on the crew who can perform a particular job) becomes too sick, it can mean mission death. This maritime personnel system pale beyondresource management, and each person’s loyalty to the show. If you want to survive, your overall goal is to achieve as close to harmony as possible between 22 humans who are clumsy, irritating, awkward, or just plain rude.

The claustrophobic polar setting is a quick and effective way to force the show into an uncomfortably small radius of each character’s personal space. It feels as far away as land. As the show draws the crew closer to the Viscount’s last known position, there’s a grim sense of the inevitable — an effort thwarted by constant failures and tough decisions. But despite the branching paths on the locked tree system, pale beyond It’s ruined by its apparent lack of polish and the small UX choices that snowball after repeated mission deaths and failures.

For example, a ‘locked’ save/load tree system means that if you die (i.e. your expedition ends due to lack of courtesy), you can only go back a few points on the tree. Boring UI notifications and over 20 individual character prompts until you die again.Halfway through the game, I’ve grown accustomed to the soft little chimes warning individual crew members of frostbite and demoralization — a few times I’ve sat impatiently waiting for a series of unskippable death notifications, one by one. No matter how much I personally invest in the well-being of anxious doctors and particularly nervous technicians, each gentle little ping I got crampons on my head. It didn’t help that the game was completely drowning in typos. This is very distracting for a text-focused genre, with lots of dialogue that can make the difference between life and death through the power of prose.

Image: Bellular Studios/Fellow Traveler

You can move around the ship and talk to whoever you want, and you can only progress through the story after clicking on certain yellow-bordered icons. If you do not select “Accept Request”, the game will be interrupted and you will have to start from the last save point.

For example, at week 17, I died a few times, which in and of itself is not a big deal.I die a lot in games! pale beyond 0-5 politeness kept sending me back to the beginning of the week so no chance to change my fate. Each time, this relives another Groundhog Day (or rather, a week) of missteps, going through the aforementioned laundry list of individual illnesses and deaths, scrolling down the save tree to find his 4 It was meant to start again from the second week. — and there were many — felt like death in thousands of cuts. This is not the case in games where you have to branch out and try new captain decisions to unlock new outcomes. Occasionally, I tried a stronger, domineering version of the show, with mixed results among the crew.

After all, going back to week one, I was surprised to find that after choosing almost the same options, I somehow created a new branch in the narrative tree. I still don’t know what I did differently. But to avoid further headaches, I gave in to the most basic completion strategy. With the exception of Templeton, where the Night King and Royal Navy officer vibes clearly stinks, I let the show crew love themselves as much as possible. This was very useful in one ending, but in another it squandered a glamorous opportunity to turn the show into a selfish liar. In the end, I led most of my crew to survive in unimaginable circumstances, and I wasn’t going to waste all my hard-won moral justice.

Image: Bellular Studios/Fellow Traveler

Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the final big reveal as the game tries to break the fourth wall at the last second. It simply didn’t suit me. So far, the game has taken a fairly low-key approach to its main story beats, reinforcing the game’s immersive mystery, and coupled with constant challenges both inside and outside of Temperance Camp, it’s a paranoid momentum. I was building a sense of effectiveness. Until the moment the show entered the Viscount’s captain’s cabin, I really didn’t know what to expect.

To its credit, the game It eschews some of the most tokenistic and fetishistic tendencies of settler polar exploration/frontier fiction, ignoring strong taboos of cultural natives in favor of sensationalism. A fairly recent example was Devolver’s “immersive simulation” RPG. strange westdid a great job of introducing the Anisina Abe language, but embarrassedly chose to include a huge cultural taboo, despite working with a sensitivity consultant.

Image: Bellular Studios/Fellow Traveler

Fear Writers have tried to get around this by creating their own myths based on Inuit culture. This is essentially an exercise in renaming the unspeakable and repackaging it into a comfortable form of plausible deniability. The road to artistic freedom is often paved with things that aren’t just for cheap entertainment. pale beyondbut ignored pulling that thread in favor of focusing on crew survival. Fearleads by creating its own mythology from the perspective of a tired, hungry, superstitious sailor who believes he sees things in ice.

pale beyond, despite all its flaws and frustrations, manages to retain a kind of bleak charm, rough edges, and all. not afraid to There is one very dark scenario where you can actually feel the game happily milking the rest of your serotonin. Coming out of the ice and making land after about 40 weeks of hell feels like traveling between two worlds. The background art and environments are decidedly eerie, shrouded in ominous fog and dim light. The ocean scene with pink and orange icebergs is absolutely gorgeous, as is the dark, raging storm. If the overall plot had a little more cohesive internal logic and a little less patches, I actually feel like I could have gone back to Temperance for another whirlwind. I’m still choosing the ending to eat a good meal.

pale beyond It will be released on February 24th on Mac and Windows PC. This game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Fellow Traveler. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, but Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased via affiliate links.discoverable Additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy can be found here.