The Pale Beyond Reviews

+++

Wow.

Came with low expectations; ended up gripped from start to finish. Lovely story.

It is not easy, and no matter what, there is a high chance you will lose crew, which might be fine for achievements, but not so good for the story. I get that -46° is cold, but the sheer lack of things to burn (like the crates that are so prevalent, the left over bones after eating all the meat off the kills, not to mention the waste, seems like the writers missed some aspects of survival.

Note: playtime not accurate mostly played offline on steamdeck. Overall the game is quite good despite its flaws. There is a good story with compelling characters. You also will constantly feel the push and pull of mistakes being made as you try to keep your crew alive. While I didnt feel the need to go back and see the many branching paths there is enough here for people that want to see everything to get a decent amount of replay value from the game. Just be aware going in that its basically a decision heavy visual novel and worth a play.

Who would of guessed using a hunting shotgun on a leopard seal would end so badly.....

This review comes in three parts; a brief, spoiler-free summary of the game and my opinion of it, a reflection on the game in terms of its trigger warnings, and the portion of the review that elaborates on what I avoided for spoiler's sake. Do not continue past the trigger warning section if you'd like to be relatively surprised by how the game unfolds and possibly ends. That said, I definitely cannot spoil the entire game for you as it has multiple endings. TLDR: The game has an illustrated style that does well with office laptops and other devices that aren't Gigachad PCs. There are some bugs where the dialogue options freeze on the screen that appear to be tied to specific weeks. I will report those to the game if I can go back and record them all. The bugs have no other recourse but restarting the day, which I found annoying. I liked the audio, it was very interactive and prompted by the choices/events of the game. I would say it deepened the immersion. If I had to give this game a movie rating, I would place it around PG/PG-13. An 8-12 year old child should not play this without supervision, but mostly because they might not understand what they are doing. There are specific events that could make an eight year old cry. There's certainly profanity, but no nudity. There is no grinding or technical skill to the game, but it isn't a strictly point-and-click graphic novel. The game is all about story. If you want to 100% it, it will take a long time, but the game is not naturally very long. I played it over perhaps 2 weeks worth of responsible, I-have-work-in-the-morning nights as a working adult. Longer than The Wolf Among Us, shorter than The Last Of Us. Overall, I rate the game 7/10. I elaborate below. Don't read it if you don't want spoilers. TRIGGER WARNINGS: I have a number of mental health issues. I've watched too many movies where each person who watched and reviewed it before completely fails to mention the graphic assault in the middle of it, for example. To summarize, I would give this game a strong Yellow flag for Potentially Triggering, Proceed Aware. The worst trigger in the game, from my perspective, is the animal death unrelated to subsistence hunting. The following topics are VAGUELY REFERENCED through conversation: Split families/estranged family members, divorces, orphan life. The following topics are DIRECTLY REFERENCED through conversation: Alcoholism, cannibalism, loss of body parts (past events), cardiovascular health, physical and verbal fights, prioritizing corporate interests over human lives. The following topics are choices that your character CAN CHOOSE TO OR NOT TO MAKE: Ingesting alcohol, animal abuse, bullying, murder, neglect, allowing crew to die to wounds, frostbite, or scurvy, allowing the crew to be eaten by other animals, allowing the crew to fall from great heights, discovering corpses (non-graphic), firing guns. The following topics are choice that your character is FORCED to make: Animal death unrelated to subsistence hunting (multiple)*, allowing a crew member to become burned by hot water. [Again, please stop reading here to proceed without spoilers] - [SPOILERS INBOUND] - STORY: I will preface this by saying I did not explore every single possible outcome before forming this opinion. Some of you may have the stomach for making outrageous and cruel decisions, but ever since Flowy (from Undertale) called me out for **ACCIDENTALLY** hitting Toriel too hard and restarting my save file, I err on the side of making the decision I would actually make, not making a decision I intend to undo later. (I didn't actually want to kill her, you fking plant.) Maybe some outcomes explain this, but I am content with the endings that I explored. I rated the story as "Good" because it isn't bad, but there's some aspects of the story that I didn't find entertaining or useful, and others were downright puzzling. The game builds this tension towards arriving at the South Pole. If you make it there, you immediately receive a strong suggestion that you should turn back, along with a gun. This suggests that the crew of the previous ship, if alive, has gone so crazy that you'll need to defend your life with a gun. When you speak with Templeton, not that day, but later, he states that the expedition was prompted by the return of a mortally wounded survivor. Their fatal injury makes no sense, in retrospect. Nobody ever clarifies why the specific injury was inflicted. I'm not sure why it is relevant. Ultimately, you will end the game with about 2% more knowledge about the Viscount than you started with and one corpse. Nothing else is explained. The two endings I unlocked were "Let's Wait for the Rescue Vessel, The Cave Be Damned" and "Let's Ditch This Mutant Ship And Hail A Rescue Vessel, The Cave Be Damned." I honestly prefer the first ending, it feels like the outcome the game wants. In the second ending, I do not feel that a certain character explains their motives for desertion and cannibalism sufficiently at all. The suspicious fruit they offer me seems to offer a power that I already have, that is, to move through the save files and change choices. I was already doing that in the game, and my choices were already branching off of each other... so what was supposed to change? I refuse that power/fruit, because it appears to do nothing I'm not already doing... I might go back and see if I can warn the future cannibalism victims, but I'm not THAT invested and why would they believe me? Also in the second ending, the game heavily suggests to me through character dialogue that I have irrevocably screwed up somehow. The brothers allude to a ballad that they never explain, they're just not happy to be in the cave. Fine, so we leave the cave! But the game keeps suggesting that I've screwed up at the end, after the credits, when one of the options for the concluding poem is that I have failed everyone. Only one person died in my playthrough. Everyone else, including the cannibal, make it back alive, so who did I fail? Other character outcomes stop making sense. Cordell, in the first/best ending, appears to return to the nobility after talking about how much she hated that lifestyle. No explanation why. In the second ending, which appears to be the next best ending for maximum survival, she appears to be HOMELESS. So her options were to get squeezed back into a lifestyle she hated or endure abject poverty? Huh? The brothers, who appear obsessed with sailing... open a restaurant?? Neither of them ever suggested this inclination. They can do as they please, of course, but they said they were getting right back out on the water and that I could come with Junior at least. Perhaps because the game anticipates the deaths of most crew members - I am completely unable to heal or interact with any of the living crew that aren't the specialists after Week 38. They also have no special endings. I very much dislike this choice in the game design. It feels like as long as I keep the specialists alive, no one else really matters to the plot, which is the opposite of the game's messaging especially with ending 1. That's another thing, after the ending, I apparently cease to exist. There is no ending for the main character whatsoever besides their last diary entry, a poem that reflects on their journey. I'm not sailing with anyone or staying in touch with anyone. These are the reasons why I took three points off of the game. I prefer the first through third acts - the portion of the game where we are actually finding resources and trying to survive. After that, the plot starts to fall apart. 7/10 - [Do not scroll up, you will encounter the portion of my review with spoilers in it]

art style and music are lovely, the characters are great, lots of choices to build your own story... yay polar exploration <3

Reminded me a lot of Banner Saga, which was why I decided to buy the game. I enjoyed it for 80% of my playthrough, and then I couldn't wait to just die so I could stop playing. The good? Art was great. I liked the characters. I liked their dialogues. I liked the overall tone of the game up to the point where I realized there was no way I was going to survive. The bad? Linear story-telling. The choices really didn't matter that much. Game basically boiled down to can you gather enough resources every week. Gathering resources typically came at the cost of crew health. Crew decisions didn't make a lot of sense. Some actions were not really explained very well. Clicking certain buttons would cause the game to advance past a point of no return when you weren't ready for that to happen yet. I chose a few character choices at the start of the game, and I'm not sure they had any effect on anything that happened after the first few weeks. And even then, I think it was only slightly different dialogue trees that had the same (as in no) effect. Overall a frustrating experience. Would rather watch a YouTube video about the game than play the game itself. This is the very definition of a game with a lot of style and effort put into the aesthetics, but not a lot of effort was put into the actual gameplay.