The anticipation of what graphical delight awaited you on the next screen was almost as much of a draw as the fantastic plot.Įven though the game plot was more serious than some of it’s point-and-click contemporaries (e.g. At the time it looked astonishing, and even now the dystopian backdrops are capitivating. If the set-up sounds a little similar to Mega-City One in Judge Dredd, then it’s no coincidence – Dave Gibbons (of 2000 AD and Watchmen fame) did all of the artwork for the game (including the mini-comic), and every screen simply drips with cyberpunk chic. In order to confront LINC and learn the truth about his past, Foster must evade security and work his way down to the lower levels. It emerges that in this ruthless future world, cities comprised of mammoth skyscrapers have swallowed up most of the remaining liveable land. Working class citizens are confined to the upper levels of the city, whereas the leisure elite luxuriate below (‘beneath a steel sky’, geddit?). The game proper opens with a jaw-droppingly animated (for the Amiga) sequence as the helicopter crashlands in Union City and Foster escapes. The stormtroopers have been sent by LINC, the mysterious computer mainframe that controls the city. Upon reaching adulthood, Foster is kidnapped by stormtroopers sent from Union City (a possible future Sydney), and his tribe is murdered. He learns electronics and builds himself a robot, Joey, who becomes your companion throughout the game.
Set in a dystopian future Australia, the comic describes how the main character, Robert Foster*, is raised by Indigenous Australians after a helicopter crash in ‘The Gap’ (the Australian Outback). The developers even went so far as to create a mini-comic to be shipped with the game, detailing the events leading up to the opening credits. For, of course, ’tis in the narrative where these games truly excel, and Beneath a Steel Sky was a shining beacon in this respect. Of course, I’m doing the genre a disservice – for all the frustrating back-and-forth wandering and pixel hunting there were a hundred more golden moments of ‘Eureka!’-style puzzle solving, not to mention elaborate plot twists. “Ah, so that tiny yellow-green blob 14 screens back was actually a key!” is something you’ll never hear uttered by players of GTA. Actually, when you put it like that it’s probably not surprising that the popularity of these games waned – after all, one of the best points about Grand Theft Auto is that you never have to spend twenty minutes painstakingly combing the screen with the mouse in a bid to work out whether you’ve missed picking up an essential item.
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The fortunes of these most traditional of adventure games took a nosedive with the demise of the Amiga and never really recovered the kids got into their fancy new ‘Grand Theft Autos’ and ‘Tomb Raiders’ and rapidly lost interest in figuring out how to combine broken string with some mud in order to create a mask with which to frighten the temple guard into giving you the key for the dungeon. Beneath a Steel Sky Ah, the point-and-click adventure – a genre so fondly remembered yet so close to extinction… ~Lewis Packwood
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