The 1994 adventure game "Beneath A Steel Sky" is considered quite good (like 91% good), and to say that we miss it would be to mine a large amount of understatement from the red sands of Australia. A collaboration between Revolution Software and comic artist Dave Gibbons, Beneath A Steel Sky tackled social division, consumerism, and totalitarian control through point, click, and puzzle solving. And, of all things, a sequel will be released in 2020.

Robert Foster was last in Union City under the benevolent authority of his friend Joey. Ten years later, he visited Union City again in pursuit of his missing child, meeting at the ride-only entrance and exit (any excuse to solve a mystery). The reason is that their lives depend on their Qdos scores, which quantify their social status. Showing up for work or participating in the daily polls (which you can never do, unfortunately) changes your score, which allows you to go places and live in the lower echelons of the towering arcology. Industry and recycling are on the top tier, while the lower tier is the playground for high scorers. [Foster prefers to circumvent this system by taking an ID chip from a dead man in the desert and impersonating Graham Grundy, running errands for NPCs, using hacking devices to rearrange electronic information to his advantage, and manipulating the system directly in cyberspace . While you spend a lot of time with those in the upper echelons of society, it is actually those at the bottom, or rather the very top, who are more interesting. The thumb-obsessed murderers and genius hackers lurk among the droids, to quote Monty Python, and the piles of junk at the top of the steaming spires, their dim world of furnaces and garbage grinders in stark contrast to the bright, wide open squares they support.

Of course, this high-tech world of Eloy and Morlock would not be complete without the dark secret at its heart. The layers of high crimes and misdemeanors, and the twisted logic at the heart of it all, are like a bizarre episode of Black Mirror. Whereas "Steel Skies" showed that a sick society can be saved by good people (or robots), in "Beyond" utopia is exposed and torn apart, the nobility and enormity of the characters pitting them against each other.

"Beyond" could be called "Under a Steel Sky," as it chooses to live in the shadow of a giant. Despite this, the film burns brightly, the light celluloid has never been more beautiful, and the update from Point Click to WASD is a positive choice. It doesn't matter if you haven't played the previous film (you should), but the story revolves around it.

But the game can't help piling references on top of references; PC Gamer's 2016 retrospective of the original version featured some Northern English-esque phrasing from the voice actors that is jarring for a game that is supposed to be set in Australia. Beyond tackles this issue with a history lesson that many of the city's builders are from Hull, where much of the development work took place in the 1990s. There is a trite line in a conversation about one businessman wearing a fine coat. One character, probably Welsh, says, "The reboot is good, but it doesn't hold a candle to the original." An entire museum is devoted to the world of the first game. Outdated LINC terminals are scattered here and there, recalling the cover art for Beneath, a trip to the industrial facility atop the city. It never stops.

Beyond a Steel Sky is made in Unreal 4 and, for the most part, runs very nicely. Unfortunately, the game also suffers from some strange graphical glitches, such as characters running into you during conversations (or jumping up to shoulder height and walking on the spot - this will be fixed), long coats constantly slipping past what you are standing next to, and the entire level of the virtual world shaking violently whenever the camera moves. The level of the virtual world also has some strange graphical glitches. The jaggies persisted in the real world and required a restart of the game. Unable to jump, Foster would get caught on everything, even the outstretched legs of a corpse on the ground. The subtitles are also riddled with typos, with the occasional question mark, perhaps due to Australian question intonation, but no typos of apostrophes, multiple spaces between words, or misspellings.

GPU driver updates and subtitle patches are possible, but there are also occasional lapses in logic, which is unusual for a game where paradox and deduction determine the outcome. Characters climbing the social ladder are completely unaware that Foster is wearing a badge. Puzzles can plunge you into a mind-boggling game of throwing every switch and trying every object with everything in your inventory (although there is an excellent hint system if you really get stuck). An empty outlet looks a lot like any other outlet. Why is there an electric fence behind the waterfall? Why can Foster hide in a locker but not in a private bathroom?

Of course, the head-twisting scenes are nothing new in adventure games, nor do they detract from the wonderful world Revolution has built. It's an upgrade, not a patch, and the widespread industry adoption of Beneath's innovations, along with the recurrence of influences, make it a weak cultural impact, but certainly the best eleven hours one can spend in the Australian desert."