For example, at one point Selene encounters the human personification of a chessboard knight who is trying to remember the last battle he was in. But it’s a minor niggle, especially as the occasional orchestral scores all have a fittingly dreamy quality that counters any obtrusiveness of the background noises.īeyond the Sky features a variety of different challenges, but its main focus is on logic statements. I did find that sometimes the ambient soundscape could get a bit overwhelming, such as the rustling of the dark forest, which seemed more like someone enthusiastically crumpling up plastic garbage bags. Although there are no voices, a good number of sound effects feel mostly at home here. The audio also complements the overall fairy tale esthetic. While Beyond the Sky has very little animation other than simple walk cycles, its storybook nature makes it a game where a lot of animation would feel strangely out of place. Oftentimes these text descriptions are accompanied by various still shots to illustrate the events transpiring. It was the latter that particularly stood out to me and helped me connect to her character better than most games that employ reams of dialog lines trying to achieve the same thing.
It might include descriptions of the places and people Selene meets, the words she says, or, most interestingly, her inner thoughts and feelings along the way. Instead of having voice-overs or even simple lines of text appearing above characters’ heads when they speak, text boxes appear in the corners of the screen containing prose such as you would find in an actual fairy tale. The story itself is presented in a rather unique way from most adventures. I really enjoyed how the accumulation and development of these talents were interwoven into Selene’s journey of self-discovery over the course of the game. Each of these is added as an additional option to the verb coin, meaning that some puzzles Selene encounters early on can’t be tackled until she has learned the necessary skill elsewhere. However, through her travels she will learn important lessons that unlock additional abilities, such as being able to look beyond surface impressions, listen, touch/pick up, and to speak and sing. In the beginning, Selene only has one general action available. Selene is controlled in typical point-and-click fashion, with a verb coin appearing with different actions to select upon clicking points of interest. The whole visual look is that of an illustrated storybook come to life, nicely matching the narrative content that teaches Selene about acceptance, tolerance, and bravery needed to escape the dark forest and everything it contains.
Scenes are built up of multiple layers, allowing for parallax scrolling as Selene moves across them, giving a greater sense of dimensionality to the areas she traverses. The journey will ultimately see her visit a kindly wizard in his tree house, a seashore presided over by Death, and a foreboding ogre’s cave, among other fantastical locales.īeyond the Sky’s settings and characters are all rendered in a sort of cutout paper doll fashion. From here on out Selene must fend for herself and learn about life, death, and overcoming her fears so that she can eventually confront the wolf again and reclaim her stolen amulet. There he steals her adularia, a mystical talisman she planned to use to reach the moon, and abandons the young woman in the forest. The story opens with the wolf guiding the naïve Selene into his dark woods. So she left the tower and started out on one of the most challenging, delightful fantasy tales I’ve had the fortune to play in recent years.Īs is often the case in fairy tales, this one features a big, bad wolf. But Selene wanted to see the world, even travel to the moon. In this game they placed a young maiden, Selene, in the safety of a castle tower. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, indie developer Iperurania Arts created the charming point-and-click fairy tale adventure Beyond the Sky.
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