‘benevolent’ AI. The machine has, in
fact, taken things a little too literally,
and Union City is now something of a
controlling, 1984 -style society.Watch you want?
For Cecil, Beyond A Steel Sky is a
welcome return to a world that’s
familiar yet still thrilling to him. “It’s
hard writing a new game, particularly
an adventure game,” he says. “There
are a gazillion games but almost all
of them have a repeated gameplay
loop, which gets harder, and that’s
fine. But we’re writing games where
as the narrative changes, the spirit
of the puzzles changes and it’s quite
reassuring to come back to a game
where you know the main characters,
their motivations and the world.
Because focusing on innovative
gameplay [as well as] creating a new
world and new characters would be
such a big undertaking, so it’s really
reassuring to come back to a game we
know. And it’s great to be back working
with Dave Gibbons.”
The game’s look has Gibbons’ art
style all over it, and it has a lovely
comic book feel. The game is again
powered by Revolution’s concept of
Virtual Theatre, the engine used in the
original and that enabled the team to
create an important sense of ongoing
on-screen drama. NPCs wander around
the city, in need of your help; lending
them a hand will contrive a way to
open up a new area, or advance
something plot-wise. Outside the city,
at the start of the game, Foster meets
a truck driver who’s broken down and
needs a battery to get moving again.
We find the kind of battery we need
powering a droid, which seems to be
in charge of scrap disposal. Since he
helped install it, Foster is able to hack
the city’s AI system, ‘LINC’, and subvert
its functions to his requirements. In
this case, he is able to manipulate
the conveyor belts and magnets the
droid’s using in order to incapacitate
it, and get its battery.
“There are some fans that say,
we want this to be point-and-click,”
notes Cecil. “What we’ve got to do is
convince them that we can convey the
spirit of a point-and-click adventure,
that actually, through our 3D, we can
do the Virtual Theatre in a way that’s
so much more dynamic than we can
ever do it in a point-and-click.” QIt’s not often we’ve had to wait a
quarter of a century for the sequel to
a game, but then the last 25 years has
just flown by. Back in 1994, Tarantino
had a new film out, The Lion King was
also in cinemas, Friends was on the
telly and... hang on, maybe not too
much has changed there. When it
comes to games, though, things have
moved on massively in two-score and
five Christmasses.
The 1994 game Beneath A Steel Sky
was a 2D point-and-click cyberpunk
adventure on MS-DOS and Amiga, by
Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons and
game development legend Charles
Cecil. But while these days we may
have more sophisticated gaming
hardware and an appetite for open
worlds, that doesn’t mean the spirit
of a point-and-click adventure
like Beneath A Steel Sky can’t be
reimagined for 2019.
Events in the original took place
in a post-apocalyptic future, in the
cyberpunk settlement of Union City.
You played one Robert Foster, a
young boy who, with the help of his
sentient robot companion Joey, would
eventually right the wrongs of the
cyberpunk city. Now Foster, grown up
and sporting a grizzled ‘wasteland
warrior’ look, returns to find Union City
may not quite be as nice a place as
when he left it under the control of aCharles Cecil and Revolution are best known for Beneath A Steel Sky and the Broken Sword games
Beyond
A Steel Sky
We’d make a terrible pun, but
that would be beneath us
Chris Burke
PUBLISHER REVOLUTION SOFTWARE
DEVELOPER REVOLUTION SOFTWARE ETA LATE 2019BIG BAD
CITY
Union City is bigger
than it was 25 years
ago. “With Beneath A
Steel Sky, what we did
was give the sense
that the world was
enormous by not
showing very much of
it,” reveals Cecil. “This
is considerably bigger,
but you move through
the environment
much faster. The story
moves a lot faster
than would be
possible in a
point-and-click
adventure.”
“It’s reassuring to come
back to a game where you
know the main characters”
030 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE
PREVIEW