Beneath A Steel Sky
- Innovative Virtual Theatre-Environment Generates A Sophisticated World Where Every Action You Take Has Repercussions & Each Character You Meet Exists Outside It’s Contemporary Location
- Over 100 Locations Designed & Art Directed By Award-Winning Comic Book Author Dave Gibbons
- Exclusive Dave Gibbons’ Beneath A Steel Sky Comic Book Included!
- An Animated Comic Book Adventure!
- PC MS-DOS CD-Rom
Product Description
Foster’s fate is in your hands as he talks to people and explores the area around him in an attempt to learn why he was brought to the City. At the start of the game Foster has escaped from the wreck of the helicopter in which he was kidnapped. Now it is up to you to ensure that he eludes Security in order to learn his past and his fate.
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The ScummVM scheme lets you play classic point-and-click adventure sports meeting on modern operating systems using the original data files for each game. In most cases you need to grant the data files (from a bought copy) yourself, but the designers of Beneath a Steel Sky have kindly released their game to ScummVM for free. That means: you can try out this seminal cyberpunk title FREE OF CHARGE and on a variety of operating systems. I chose to give this one a shot and see what it was all about, since I wasn’t out anything to look into it.
The conundrum I have with this game is that it has a hard time finding its stylishness and sticking to it. Is it a comic-book game? Not really, since there are only a very few cutscenes, and the rest is just like any other point-and-click adventure. Is it a gritty cyberpunk dystopia set in a realistic and frightening future? Well, not quite… despite the decaying city and forays into cyberspace, every character makes cheap puns and quotes box shows, and so the player can’t take the setting seriously. What about a humorous adventure, like the Space Quest series? No, that doesn’t fit either, since there are parts obviously meant to be taken seriously.
The result is a mishmash of genres, styles, pop-culture references, and storyline that tries to do too much and doesn’t deliver well on any. Most everything is over-acted, laden with unpleasant dialogue, narrowly escaped by wacky hijinks, or otherwise impossible to take seriously. If you can get with the tone, you’ll absolutely like the game. I couldn’t and it bugged me to no end. And the music is pretty dreadful (except the jukebox tunes…)
There are some excellent points, though. The graphics are brilliant – nicely drawn and well-animated. Though I didn’t care much for the script, I appreciated the speech version of the game – it really brought the characters to life. The cyberspace puzzles were pretty fascinating (simple though). I only had very minor troubles with the interface. And, goofy quips aside, the tale was in fact a very fascinating tale of computers, overbearing caste systems, and government overlords.
I recommend this one only to adventure game regulars looking for another game to try. As a cyberpunk fan, I was disappointed with the lighthearted look at an Orwell nightmare. At least it’s free now, and ScummVM makes it simple to try it out yourself without too much effort.
Rating: 2 / 5
This game is a real classic
i remeber watch my brother playing this game.
Excellent times indeed.
i played this game for myself just a 2 months ago, still a splendid game worth the time and the cash
Joakim Fredheim
Norway
Rating: 5 / 5