Tag: Beautiful Desolation

Completed Beautiful Desolation.
You do get to switch to your companions once or twice, but only for the sake of a single puzzle. Otherwise, they are here to provide different perspectives on the choices you have. And turns out, there are a few choices in this game.
At one point, you meet a tribe of flying human carcasses, unable to fully die, carried by their drones. You may decide to “free” them or leave them be. On another occasion, you’re given a choice between a more technologically advanced tribe that has virtually enslaved another tribe by providing them with free drugs. And on another occasion, you make a choice between a nanotech civilisation and what is basically a sentient moss.
One of the common themes is that a lower civilisation assumes that the communication of a higher level civilization is actually a “voice of God”. This happens at least twice throughout the game. First, the flying carcasses think that the drug dealers are “gods”, because they received their transmission. Then the drugdealers themselves happen to do the same, receiving transmission from the nanomachines. Who themselves were a failed experiment.
Despite this being an adventure game, there’s a minigame inside it that is basically a 3×3 JRPG-style battle. But collecting characters for it turned out to be a huge hassle.

The ending is not entirely what I expected. I thought it would be completely cyclic, where it turns out you cause the incident yourself, or that you change the past and safe your fiance. But no, you return to where you left, and continue living “happily ever after”.

I’m not very good in adventure games. But I managed to complete this one without looking in a guide once. Maybe because some of the situations have alternative solutions, unlike most other adventures, where you have to get into the heads of the developers.
The most trouble I had was with prerendered backgrounds, it’s often hard to understand where you can and can’t walk, so I would sometimes miss crucial items, such as the drone.
Another interesting quirk is that his game has a rudimentary credit system. Sometimes you’ll find or get gold items. And their sole surpose is to be converted into credits. Ship upgrades are bought with credits, and while some are just cosmetic or quality of life improvements like the travel speed, others are necessary to complete the game.

I thought it to be another Fallout. Turns out it’s more of a Sanitarium. Luckily, there’s no pixel hunting, most active objects can be seen from afar.

We travel an apocalyptic world together with our fat brother and a robot dog. The main purpose of companions is to provide stories, and they do it pretty well.
The brother, who the hero despises at the beginning of the story, turns out to be a war veteran than became homeless due to his PTSD. And the robot dog was a prototype for a robot that feel emotions. It was a success, but she killed her creator in the process, and lied about feeling anything, so she was deemed a failure.

And the beginning of the game, we accidentally travel to the future. And the whole game is focused around our attempts to build a time travel machine to journey back. In order to do that, we try to help, or sometimes to pass rituals of what appears to be different South African tribes. All of them cybernetic or outright robotic.