As a fan of the isometric perspective and adventure games in general, Beautiful Desolation caught my eye. When I first discovered it just a few weeks ago, I also realized that it was previously a PC-only title, but that it was soon to be released for Switch and PS4, the latter of which I received a review code for. Developed by The Brotherhood — whose previous work includes Stasis and Cayne — Beautiful Desolation presents players with a gorgeous world to explore in a post-apocalyptic adventure that blends deep topics such as time travel, immortality, human-robotic relations and dynamics, aliens, as well as more down to earth subjects such as brotherhood and family strife. At times, I felt like Beautiful Desolation (BD) bit off a little more than it could fully chew, but ultimately there are a lot more pros to this experience than not.
The game begins with a cutscene taking place on a lonely road in South Africa. Your playable character, Mark, and his fiancée are out driving one night when suddenly a storm arises and something strange and massive appears in the sky. A car wreck ensues, killing the fiancée and Mark damages his leg. The story fast-forwards ten years and things are much different across the world. The strange entity that appeared in the sky remains, but it brought with it massive upgrades in tech for the world, including medical advances that Mark’s very leg was aided by via a sort of exoskeleton brace. It also brought with it the uprising of an entity known as the Penrose Alliance, a massive corporation of tech and military might. Mark, an investigative journalist, is not convinced that their intentions are all good, and has to know more about what this thing is, how it suddenly appeared one night in the skies above South Africa, and who’s behind it. He decides to take a helicopter to board the Penrose, which is illegal, but he enlists the help of his older brother and former marine pilot Don to fly him there. They manage to pull this off one night when storms are expected and a lot of the guard of the Penrose is set to be off duty. The duo make it there, but soon after, security drones capture them. Suddenly, they’re taken to the future, in another time and space, with the world having once again undergone tremendous change, this time on an apocalyptic scale. Mark’s new quest therefore becomes to restore his timeline and get back home.
I’m not going to try to explain the story because it’s one that unfolds very nicely as you play through the roughly 10 hour adventure, and it’s written well enough that you should get to experience it for yourself. I was impressed at how The Brotherhood kept introducing compelling new areas to explore and lots of wild looking and sounding characters. Many of these are creepy-looking or sounding, and everything from organic life forms (though almost no humans) to cyborgs and bugs and creatures that had lived multiple lives — there’s a lot of creativity and heart put into making a really interesting game world. One of your companions, a failed military experiment robotic/drone dog that has emotions (but lied to the military about having them), is another interesting and offbeat character that players get to interact and travel around with. You’ll travel across several major hubs with lots of smaller areas within, visiting all kinds of cool places and speaking to these creative characters, all in the name of solving puzzles to get back home. There’s an inventory system, branching dialog in which players can take different attitudes towards NPCs from aggressive to kind, and even a small currency system in-game so that Mark can purchase items to advance the story. There’s a lot to unpack as you play through BD, and lot of questions arise about some high level sci-fi and philosophical things, and the the devs did a nice job of diving into that.
Excellent visual perspective, art, strong story and good characters and dialog, and classical point-and-click adventure puzzle design makes up the core positives of BD. On the other hand, there are some things about BD that significantly detract from the experience. I struggled with bumping into numerous invisible walls, for example. I’m not sure how to better address this really, but the player is apt to run into a lot of invisible walls for areas that you would expect to be able to get to. Now, there’s still plenty of areas to explore, even though many of them are pretty small and, well, desolate in terms of interactables, NPCs, and a largely absent soundtrack (I even turned up the individual volume for the music but rarely heard it, to my surprise). And, there are a lot of items that you can read a description of, giving the world that much more atmosphere. Actually on that note, I liked the ability to press the touchpad and get to see all of the descriptions of all objects on my screen at once, rather than having to pixel hunt, although sometimes the text boxes overlap each other making it a little cumbersome to read.
This brings me to my second point, and that is to say that the UI was clearly designed for PC (mouse/keyboard) interaction, not gamepad. The UI gets little explanation on console, and takes a little getting used to. Similar to bumping into invisible walls, it all takes a little getting used to and it doesn’t feel as streamlined as you’d like.
Another issue I had with BD was sometimes not really knowing where to go or what to do next. For much of the game, knowing where to go next was pretty clear, but there were ultimately several times when I resorted to a walkthrough so as to not waste time traveling between one area and the next. You see, there rather quickly ends up being many different areas that you can visit, and it takes several seconds, even upwards of a minute or so, to travel between these sites. This is dependent on several factors, such as where you’re at and where you’re going to. Now, the delay is not born out of load times (which, by the way, the experience between PS4 Pro and PS5 in terms of presentation and load times is practically indistinguishable), but more so because of how the game was designed. First, you have to be outside to hail you transport ship, the Buffalo; then, you have to select a portal, also known as a warden, to travel between the bigger areas; then, navigate via a menu to the specific spot you want to go to. Each of these half dozen bigger areas have typically at least a half dozen areas within themselves. Once you select, there’s an animation and another relatively brief load screen. You can probably tell how this can quickly add up to a lot of dead end searches, and when you visit places with literally nothing to do and no one to talk to, and your NPC buddies offering nothing but quips about being tired and needing to slowdown, it gets a little grating, inefficient, and detracts from the experience. My playtime would have been cutdown probably a good hour or more, and my enjoyment level given a further boost, if there were a little bit more direction at times so that I didn’t waste time backtracking needlessly. It’s not a bad idea to keep a walkthrough handy just for that nudge in the right direction to spare yourself some wasted time.
Beautiful Desolation is one of those games that has a lot of strong points, but has a few significant drawbacks that keep the experience in check, so to speak. Still, despite its few drawbacks, I found myself hooked on the game after the first half hour and I had to see it through, not unlike the captivating experience that a good page-turning book can do for you. Plus, at only $20, you really can’t go wrong here if you’re looking for a solid sci-fi adventure with gorgeous visuals.
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