Beneath a Steel Sky

Before the Broken Sword, there was a Steel Sky. Before George Stobbart, there was Robert Foster.

Oh, but I don't really have to tell you that, have I? After all, if you are 20 or more, you'll probably remember the forgotten video game genre, called point-and-click. Forget gamepads; use your mouse - and not for moving the crosshair, but a cursor. Not a lot of new games have cursors in them during the gameplay, right? Point-and-click was a once a firm genre, one of the most important kinds of game out there and the pride of computer owners. Console games of the past (grand-grand-gen) tended to be very simple: 4-directional pad and 2 action buttons (four, if you were lucky) so all they seemed to offer was platformers, shooters and driving games, while PCs, Amigas, Ataris, MSXs and even Macs flourished with games which required more complicated controls - adventures, managerials, turn-based strategies, real-time strategies, Microsoft Flight Simulator... Today, things are different, as everything tries to be as straight-forward as possible. A game where you have to become a member of an exclusive, private club just to obtain a glass with some fingerprints would seem totally illogical and crazy (on the other hand, show me a point-and-click title where you have a next-gen console with an opportunity to "buy money" for your game; dig this - you spend money for some points you spent to buy money!).

Anyway, back to B.A.S.S. I'm not going to tell you anything about the plot - that's because either you know it already, or I'm not going to spoil the fun in case you've never played it before. Suffice to say, it's the cyberpunk future (yummy...), the society is divided into classes, where the snobs are living on the ground in their posh apartments while the slums are working hard in the rusty sky-high factories above the clouds. There's a sinister computer controlling everything and there's one man with American accent from outside the city on a crusade to figure what the hell is going on.

The graphics are of a decent, slightly-worse-than-Broken-Sword quality, the music is not altogether pleasant, but will do, the interface is pretty intuitive. The collection of items in your inventory is placed neatly in the upper area of your screen, as are the dialogue options, and there's not too much pixel hunting. Also, the flow of the story is very entertaining, which is a trademark feature of Revolution titles. The game bursts with jokes and funny dialogues read by actors with either a French of British accent (Irish, maybe) - the accent itself is another trademark of Revolution Software. :-)

Okay, this was a short episode, but, let's face it - who doesn't know Beneath a Steel Sky? If you haven't played it - you can download it for free from Revolution's website (the new SCUMMVM engine allowing it to work flawlessly on newer platforms), even check the official spoiler-free walkthrough if you happen to get stuck. I strongly encourage you to do so.

PS. About a year a go, Tony Warriner announced that Revolution was working on a revamped version of the original Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars with some extra plot and other stuff thrown in. The game is to be released on DS and Wii. They keep quiet about the project, but I look forward to it just the same. The world needs it.