Ahead is the city gate, behind us, the endless expanse of the Aussie outback. The entrance to Union City is a large circular area teeming with life, including floating robots, citizens wandering around, and even some native Australian wildlife. In most adventure games characters just stand in one place waiting for you to talk to them, here they moved around, and Revolution is taking this concept a step further in Beyond.

It was pretty basic stuff, but it made the world feel more alive. This meant that some characters would have routines, and would only appear in certain places at certain times. Revolution’s first few games, including Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky, used a technology called Virtual Theatre that introduced some basic simulation elements to the traditional adventure game format. But Beyond has a few fresh ideas up its sleeve too, including a new version of its Virtual Theatre system. Revolution is still an adventure-game designer at heart, and Beyond a Steel Sky will be heavy on puzzles, conversations, and exploration.ĭialogue is presented similar to Mass Effect, with a selection of options to choose from-a pretty standard affair with lines marked as to whether they’ll progress the story or just provide background info and gags. It’s bright and colourful, with expressive characters rendered in a bold comic book style.Ī benevolent AI, strongly hinted to be Joey from the first game, is running the city now, but this being an adventure game, finding your way in involves more than just dropping your old pal a WhatsApp. This isn’t some bleak, rain-sodden Blade Runner vision of the future. The light-hearted tone of the original game has been retained, too. The only location revealed so far is the entrance to the city, but it’s an impressive sight-a colossal gate with skyscrapers stretching endlessly into the stark, blue desert sky.

Beyond a Steel Sky is fully 3D, with a third-person viewpoint, and Revolution has developed a graphics technology designed to mimic the distinctive style of Gibbons, who is back on board again as art director.

Beyond a steel sky museum