The Pale Beyond

Great little game. Survival mechanics are light. Story is good. Characters are good. Endings are interesting. Music is good. At it's core it's a choose your own adventure type story with some light survival mechanics with a great cast of characters and an ending that's interesting in itself to explore that buttons up much of the story. You play the first mate that becomes the captain of a questionable expedition. The boat's various cast of characters is likeable. Wish there were more than were well fleshed out but the ones that were were real good. The scene/environment as the story progresses changes regularly which keeps things interesting. There's a number of twists too that keep things fun. It has a novel save system which lets you go back and choose different routes which is creative. v1.3.0 fixes all the major/minor bugs that cause problems. On GoG now. Before GoG had 1.3.x the devs were kind enough to help make a work around for a progress killing bug but after 1.3.x I was able to go back and test and things progressed fine. So, good support from the devs. For a dev's first release they did fantastic (despite some early release bugs - which I'm overlooking here because of the direct support from the devs when I posted my problem on their discord).

It is at its core a resource management game, where you try to keep the morale of your crew high, while rationing food and heating supplies. Around this core, however, is a gripping story with beautifully written dialog and fascinating characters. Although the gameplay is simple, it is fairly challenging, even though I am no stranger to strategy games. The artistic style, including the pictures and the music, is simply beautiful. It made me really feel the weight of the critical decisions that I had to make.

+ good story, nice melancholic atmosphere + I like the artwork and + the atmospheric sound = replaying weeks/ rounds after failure feels like a chore (the dialogs are the same, all over again) - a few easy to fix spelling mistakes (bickets of coal :/) - missing left handed mouse support, no way to switch mouse buttons, game ignores OS mouse settings After all I still will try it again until I succeed - I don't think I will replay it afterwards. Would buy it again.

A well-written adventure with great atmosphere. Very tense but fair. The characters are realistic and grow on you. It's not impossible to keep all your crewmembers alive, but you may have to replay multiple weeks, and you certainly will be at the edge of your seat the whole time. There's some very interesting plot twists and turns at the end that add a lot to the story and make it even more intriguing. This is very much a visual novel in spirit, and I only wish it was a visual novel in code as well - it's beautiful and more dynamic like this, but there's so many branching paths I would like to explore and it's hard to stomach repeating scenes again and again without the 'skip' functions that a full visual novel would have.