The Pale Beyond Review (alstroemerium.)
Unfortunately The Pale Beyond isn't good enough to justify the $20 price tag. Even at the $8 I paid, it feels tough to recommend.
The short:
The Pale Beyond is frustrating because it has a lot of components to be a great game - the art is good, the music is good, the characters are good, the resource management gameplay is fine. The game is played out in five acts, and the first three are solid. Sadly, acts 4 and 5 throw away the gameplay entirely and railroad you to the end of the story, which ends up... not great, and the other aspects of the game don't carry it hard enough through the end.
If this ever goes on sale for $5, it might be worth it for one playthrough. My first full playthrough (including one loss during act 3) ended up at about 6.5 hours according to Steam, so it is not a very long game.
The long:
The Pale Beyond is a visual novel trying really hard to present itself as something else, to its detriment. It's heavily dialogue driven and decision making affects the characters' relationship with the protagonist (you). It also has a branching story (kind of), and you are encouraged to replay the game to find the 'true' ending.
Unlike traditional VNs, there is no option to automatically skip already read text; between that and a few long, unskippable cutscenes, I felt heavily discouraged from actually doing another playthrough. I did (and even got all the achievements to see if I missed anything), and unfortunately the payoff at the end didn't feel worth it.
Without spoiling specifics, the issue is primarily due to the plot/storytelling being at odds with the gameplay. Playing well removes a lot of the tension during what should be the climax of the game, making it a foregone conclusion instead. Maybe that's the point - I'm not sure - but in any case it made for an underwhelming ending.
There are technical issues that made this game feel like an early access title, despite it being almost two years after release. Issues like soft locks after selecting certain dialogue choices, mouse controls just failing to work (especially common when ending a week and at the start of the epilogue), really long boot time, and extremely finicky achievements. My first playthrough also had consistency issues during the ending, where the game thought I still had a certain key item and a certain character in crew when I shouldn't have.
Saving in this game is also... bizarre. You get an autosave at the start of every week (which itself hangs the game a few seconds), and that's it. No manual saves, no quick save/quick load... and rewinding to previous weeks delete save files from past that point. There is an option near the end of the game to make your playthrough's saves permanent but you are not forced to take it. Some really questionable design choices here.
The actual gameplay consists of delegating your crew to scout the ice or get resources for the week, which you can use to refill the food pot and the furnace for the week. This part is actually fine, despite needing some quality of life additions; crew assignments should really have been centralized on a chalkboard or sheet of paper or something, because needing to click down three flights of stairs each week during act 1 to assign sailors to gather coal is miserable game design.
Regardless, I found myself wishing that there were an 'endless' game mode (like Frostpunk), with or without narrative components. Unfortunately no such mode exists. Also unfortunately, as mentioned above, the gameplay is completely thrown aside in the final two acts of the game.
The art and music itself is also fine; consistently good, even. Vocal tracks could have been better utilized; there was one at week sixteen and seventeen and nowhere else, despite there being a huge opportunity when transitioning from act 3 to act 4. Otherwise no complaints in the audiovisual department, clearly head and shoulders above the rest of the team.
Ultimately, there is a strong foundation for a good game here but the way the story plays out in the final act ruins its potential, to a point where I won't recommend this it.