Beautiful Desolation

Beautiful Desolation was reviewed on a PS4

Beautiful Desolation masterfully explores the idea of a somewhat peaceful post-apocalypse, where people solve their problems by having conversations instead of resorting to violence. This makes it unique in the sense that it twists your expectation of what a post-apocalyptic world would be like.

When I think about a post-apocalypse, my mind goes straight to violent cults, laser weapons, mutated monsters and a lot of gore. Instead, in Beautiful Desolation, the world is filled with people that are just trying to survive, each with their own jobs and their own dreams and ambitions. You usually talk your way out of everything, you can be aggressive with your dialogue choices, but that doesn’t amount to anything except pissing off the character you’re talking with.

What is Beautiful Desolation?

Beautiful Desolation is a point and click game without all the pointing and clicking. It has all of the trademarks of the 90s era adventure games. From world-building expository dialogues, to obscure and intentionally ambiguous objectives, all wrapped up in the gorgeous art style that perfectly captures South Africa’s Savannah landscapes.

You play as Mark Leslie, who travels hundreds of years into the future after a freak accident at the top of an enigmatic alien landmark called the Penrose, a gigantic triangle-shaped metal hovering alien object. The game’s plotline revolves around the Penrose; no one knows its origin, its function, or even its very nature. While Mark and his fiancée were driving to his brother’s, the Penrose suddenly appeared in front of their very eyes and decimated everything in its vicinity. Their car crashed and his fiancée was killed in the accident.

A Trip To The Past

The game then fast forwards a couple of years and we tag along with Mark as he find his brother and tries to convince him to fly him up to the Penrose where a freak accident sends them forward to a distant future. Mark is convinced that the Penrose is manmade, but it takes him quite a while to figure out if that’s true since his priorities shift after they land in the bleak future. Your main objective during your playthrough of Beautiful Desolation is to go back to the past. That’s no easy task though, as you’ll have to endure a ton of fetch quests to do so.

South Africa looks as beautiful in this desolate world as it does in real life. It’s filled with intriguing and bizarre looking characters. While most of the characters you meet are human, they’re so alien looking that it’s an absolute treat to meet a new character and talk to them. I’d imagine that if a man from 1922 was sent to our present life, we’d look just as much alien to him as the characters in the game do to us.

The Protagonist Syndrome

The game suffers massively though from something I’d like to call “The Protagonist Syndrome”. All of the other characters keep giving you tasks that you’re clearly not equipped for, simply because you’re the protagonist. Their first thought when seeing Mark, a man from the past, a man that doesn’t understand their culture, their technologies or even the layout of the land, is to give him a task that usually has to do with all of the things I just mentioned.

It gets ridiculous at times, as Mark keeps asking simple questions and the characters keep on looking down on him simply for asking them. It’s realistic though that Mark is as clueless as the player in this world, and that allows you to learn all about the futuristic South Africa through the expository dialogue.

Set In South Africa’s Savannahs

The dedication to the African setting is also apparent in both the game’s picturesque maps and the characters’ accents. All of the characters in the game are fully voice acted and talk in a South African accent, saying stuff like kak, fokken and Ja. This gives the game a lot of character and it’s all the better for it.

The game was intriguing to me because of its setting, and I was pleasantly surprised with how well they handled it. Even though I’ve never been to South Africa myself, I can still tell that the developers poured a lot of effort into retaining the nations’ charm in the game’s landscapes. Most areas are filled with metal shanties and straw huts, abandoned vehicles and stripped airplanes, mixed with futuristic buildings, holograms and neon signs. This combination of both modern day and futuristic elements helps establish the game’s unique visual style.

Beautiful Desolation’s Music was made by the legendary Mick Gordon and you can tell as you’ll immediately feel as if there’s a foreboding sense of DOOM (see what I did there?). Though I wonder how many tracks, they commissioned him to make, since outside of the main menu and a few cutscenes in the beginning, there wasn’t much music in the game. Ambient music tracks are present while you explore the desolate lands, but they’re not memorable enough to make an impact.

An Isometric View

Beautiful Desolation uses a top down isometric view, and as such, all of its typical flaws are here. It’s confusing and difficult at times to know where you can go. At multiple times during my playthrough, I was lost and didn’t know where to go until I found out that you could squeeze through a particular passage and open up a completely new area to explore, a passage that was obscured because of the isometric view. There’s no platforming sections though, so that’s a big relief.

The futuristic universe of Beautiful desolation is controlled by the agnate, a race of sentient robots and Mark suspects they’re the ones behind the Penrose’s existence. You’ll get the pleasure of having an agnate robot-dog tagging along with you as a pet companion. She’s called Pooch, and the dialogue between Pooch and Mark is well written and emotionally impactful. In fact, most of the game’s conversations are a treat, and they help build this fascinating world.

Progression Can Be Tedious At Times

In order to progress, you’ll at times be required to talk to a certain character more than once. However, the game doesn’t tell you directly who to talk to or where to go, this can make things a bit frustrating. This wouldn’t have been an issue if the game didn’t have such a massive amount of characters and locations to talk with and visit.

The good thing though is that you can review all of the conversations you had using your trusted PDA. With a click of a button, you can review your objectives, your conversations’ log, check out the map and connect to any nearby terminals. This helps a lot in knowing where to go next, without having to resort to an online walkthrough.

When you finish a conversation with a character, you won’t be able to interact with them anymore. This could have you believing that you’ve done everything that can be done in a certain area but that’s not true, since you’re usually required to go back to a location that you visited earlier to progress in the game.

Overall,

It’s a nice change of pace to play a game that’s populated by hostile characters yet in which the protagonist almost never resorts to violence. The fact that the protagonist is as clueless as you are is so refreshing, since it feels as if both of you are exploring and experiencing this world for the first time together.

The dedication to the game’s setting is impressive as well, and the backdrops of the locations that you visit are gorgeous. Coupled with the imaginative character designs that are all fully voiced, made the simple act of exploring this world an absolute treat.

If it weren’t for the somewhat slow pace and the story progression issues, Beautiful Desolation would’ve been an instant classic. It’s still a great game, and one that I wholeheartedly recommend, but it’s not without its flaws.

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Special thanks go to Wire Tap Media for providing us with a review code.

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You should play Beautiful Desolation if you

• Would love to explore South Africa
• Don’t mind the lack of combat
• Love the gorgeous visual style
• Don’t mind the issues of the isometric view
• Love a dialogue-heavy game
• Don’t mind the slow paced story

Beautiful Desolation’s Score

8/10