#Beneath a steel sky christian review full#
#Beneath a steel sky christian review professional#

The interface is also a direct descendant of VGA-era Sierra, with Walk, Look, Action, and Inventory icons always available at the top of the screen.

#Beneath a steel sky christian review professional#

The walking animations look professional as well, and the game has no graphical glitches of note- Alum is always appealing to look at.

This creativity extends to the more fantastical characters like Gunther, the giant green swamp head with a grumpy disposition. The graphics also successfully convey the designersвЂ™ sense of imagination, with impressive settings like the walkways of Slip Town, which tower over sets of similar walkways below and lend to a real sense of dimension. The outdoor locations feature beautiful use of colors and shading to create a very realistic looking backdrop of both light and dark sky, and snow-covered mountains in the distance. It looks absolutely fantastic in its 320x200 pixelated glory, with gorgeous colorful, expansive art reminiscent of the best of VGA days gone by. But more on that later, as there is much about this game to admire.ДЇor better or worse, Alum is truly a throwback to Golden Age Sierra games. Possible spoiler alert: itвЂ™s the story of sin, repentance, and salvation in the traditional Christian sense, and it couldnвЂ™t possibly be communicated less delicately. And now itвЂ™s their mission to bring the cure to those with the disease and spread the love of the Unfeigned Altruist. This other group of people has found a cure, though, and it involves conversations with a deity that canвЂ™t be seen. LetвЂ™s see, thereвЂ™s a disease that a large group of people-including loved ones of those who donвЂ™t have the disease-are slowly succumbing to. That is, until you apply the most obvious, un-subtle religious parallels to it.

#Beneath a steel sky christian review full#

Sound like an interesting narrative? It sure is itвЂ™s creating a new universe full of its own unique mythology.

ItвЂ™s out in the fringes of the Land of Tide that Alum chooses to drink from a mysterious potion called a Rushlight, which brings him into close contact with a mysterious benevolent deity known as the Unfeigned Altruist. There are menacing robot guards, secret meetings with underground rebels, locked doors to open with inventory items (some genre conventions are timeless), and eventually the immediate need to flee Kosmos and seek out the Rogations, the resistance group that may hold the key to the virus. The whole setting of this first chapter is a really cool throwback to sci-fi games like Beneath a Steel Sky, which unfortunately there have never been nearly enough of in this genre. Alum is a delivery boy in Kosmos, and in the course of doing this job, he learns that a cure for The Vague might exist. The opening scene introduces us to Alum and his wife Esther, who has become the latest victim of the disease and its symptomatic loss of hope.

Glym observes the city from his towers above, while his citizens are slowly crippled by a virus known only as The Vague-an illness that produces no visible side effects but overwhelms its hosts with sadness and loss of the will to exist. A mysterious protector by the name of Mr. The first chapter (of seven) introduces Alum Descry, the title character, a denizen of the futuristic city of Kosmos in the Land of Tide. And then, sadly, its storytelling falls all to pieces and strips away the gameвЂ™s thin veneer to expose what is, ultimately, an incredibly ham-fisted and brutally heavy-handed allegory of the evangelical Christian faith. It beats with the classic heart of a Golden Age 320x200 point-and-click, it excels at a balance of interesting and reasonably solvable puzzles, and appears in its early stages to meld science fiction and fantasy elements to the tune of great narrative success. If youвЂ™re a fan of old-school, retro-aesthetic adventures, your heart will surely be won over when you first play Crashable StudiosвЂ™ Kickstarter-funded debut, Alum.