The Pale Beyond Review (Napoleonic S)
It's a point and click narrative game about mounting a 19th century style sea expedition to an Antarctica like region where you have to manage the needs of the ship/band and your crew.
Somewhere along the way though, I lost my interest with the game, partly because the game broke my immersion to the game and it's story due to how it handles both the gameplay and what transpired in the story.
There's no way to explain this without spoiling what happened in the game, although in this very specific case, if you got to what I'm talking about it would result in game over anyway, so you can argue it's not really a spoiler, lol
So, the game has you commanding an expedition where you issue orders and managing the interests of the expeditions and it's crew on a weekly basis, the way this is represented is that you issue orders and then those are what the crew would do for the next week, that's how the game plays, you cannot do anything mid week, after you issued orders and talked around the expeditions crew members you will be forced to "end the cycle of the week" to be able to progress through the game.
Now here's where the spoiler begin, so at some point in the game the ship would be trapped on ice and it's sinking, you would be given 2 choice : wait and do some important stuffs that may be beneficial later or just jump off the ship immediately, and this mean you and the entire crews. I waited once and it seemed to be useful and there's not much of narrative sign that communicated the ship would 100% sink on the next time I progressed to the next cycle.
But then it did, the ship sank, slowly, and even poetically narrated that way.
And everybody died, game over.
That exact moment, my immersion with the story broke, because of how stupid what has unfolded is...
Like c'mon man, it's a ship that's only slowly sinking and almost everyone onboard are sea hardened sailors, but they just sat there drowned to their deaths?
The Dev and the story writers should've came up with something better than that! What's wrong with adding more flexible emergent narrative driven gameplay? Anything other than what I described in the above?
After that incident I still played the game some more but as I told you, my immersion with the story is gone, and at some point I lost interest at continuing the game with all the repetition in the gameplay.
Now or the other parts of the game, it's visually okay, they use a combination of hand painted 2D characters with pretender Ed backgrounds, with a gritty visual style because the game is about survival adventure, it's okay but nothing really remarkable.
And the game has been patched to support 21:9 display nicely so it's good in that visual aspect, nothing to be awed by in the audio department.
Overall it's an okay narrative driven point and click game, it just that personally I couldn't like it enough to finish it.