Beautiful Desolation (2020)

When I first started playing Beautiful Desolation, I anticipated it to be another attempt at creating a Fallout-like experience. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it had more in common with the atmospheric adventure game, Sanitarium. Unlike pixel hunting in similar games, Beautiful Desolation made it easy to spot active objects from a distance.

In this post-apocalyptic world, we embark on a journey alongside our overweight brother and a robot dog. While their primary purpose is to provide engaging stories, they excel in doing so. The brother, initially despised by the hero, reveals himself to be a war veteran who became homeless due to his PTSD. As for the robot dog, it was a successful prototype designed to experience emotions but tragically ended up killing its creator, leading it to hide its true capabilities.

The game kicks off with an accidental leap into the future, setting the stage for our quest to construct a time travel machine and return home. Along the way, we encounter various South African tribes, many of which possess cybernetic or robotic attributes. Our interactions involve assisting or navigating through their rituals. While there are a few instances where we temporarily switch to our companions to solve puzzles, their primary role is to provide diverse perspectives on the choices we make. And believe me, there are plenty of choices to be made.

One memorable encounter involves a tribe of flying human carcasses, forever trapped in an agonizing existence and carried by their drones. We're given the option to "free" them or let them be. In another situation, we face a moral dilemma between supporting a technologically advanced tribe that has virtually enslaved another tribe through drug dependency. And yet again, we're confronted with a decision between a nanotech civilization and what essentially amounts to sentient moss.

A recurring theme in the game revolves around lower civilizations mistaking the communication of higher civilizations as the "voice of God." This misconception occurs at least twice, first with the flying carcasses mistaking the drug dealers as "gods" due to intercepted transmissions, and later with the drug dealers themselves perceiving the nanomachines' transmissions as divine. Ironically, the nanomachines were originally a failed experiment.

While Beautiful Desolation is primarily an adventure game, it incorporates a mini-game reminiscent of a 3x3 JRPG-style battle. However, collecting the necessary characters for this mini-game proved to be a cumbersome process.

The game's ending did not unfold exactly as I had anticipated. I expected a complete cycle where the protagonist inadvertently causes the incident or alters the past to save their fiancee. Instead, the game concludes with the protagonist returning to where they started, continuing their life in a "happily ever after" fashion.

I'm not very good at adventure games, but I managed to complete Beautiful Desolation without looking at a guide once. This is likely because the game offers multiple solutions to some puzzles, unlike many other adventure games where you have to figure out what the developers intended.

The most trouble I had with the game was the pre-rendered backgrounds. It can be difficult to tell where you can and cannot walk, so I sometimes missed crucial items, such as the drone.

Another interesting quirk of the game is the rudimentary credit system. You can find or earn gold items, which can then be converted into credits. Ship upgrades are purchased with credits, and while some of these upgrades are purely cosmetic or improve the quality of life, others are necessary to complete the game.

https://aleosha.net/tag/beautiful-desolation/