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The Pale Beyond review: a captivating survival game full of drama and despairTales from the ice
Tales from the ice
You know it’s a great turn inThe Pale Beyondwhen only five of your crew are freezing, two have frostbite, and one has scurvy. After all the struggles and dangers I’ve been through trying to keep my ship’s crew alive in the bone-biting cold of the arctic tundra, that’s definitely a success in my book.
It’s easy to describe Bellular Studio’ssurvival simas just ‘Frostpunkon a ship’, but in some ways that’s pretty accurate: you’re the leader of a group trying to survive in a harsh frozen wasteland. But it’s also a comparison that falls short in plenty of other ways. Sure, the engine of this survival sim might run the same as Frostpunk’s, but it’s buried deep in a handcrafted hull. With an overarching story that deals with the drama and despair of survival, together with a cast of underdog characters whose personalities and flaws fuel your determination to keep them alive, The Pale Beyond is much more human than its steampunk counterpart.
The Pale Beyond - Official Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
The Pale Beyond - Official Launch Trailer
Your journey begins with an interview. You are a sailor named Robin Shaw who has been drafted as First Mate into the crew of The Temperance, a ship on a mission to sail into the depths of The Pale Passage in search of its missing sister ship, The Viscount. The first couple of weeks are smooth sailing, but one morning you wake up to find that the ship is stuck in a sheet of thick ice. Not only that, but the captain is missing and you’re hundreds of miles from civilisation. As The Temperance’s new captain, you need to balance your resources, keep the crew’s morale up, and find a way to survive until you are rescued, which should take around 35 weeks. Cool, cool, cool, no problem at all.
Decisions that might appear obvious now - a stow away means an extra mouth to feed - might turn out for the best later down the line.
Right lads, we’ve got to survive for over half a year in this arctic death trap, so let’s get into the gubbins of how we’re going to do that. Like with your standard survival sim, careful resourcemanagementis the only way you’re going to see land again. In The Pale Beyond, this is represented in two categories: food for rations and fuel for the generator. At the start of your expedition, you’ll have plenty of both, but when your ship gets stuck you need to start hustling for supplies. Each turn is an in-game week, and during this time you’ll be assigning crew members different jobs; at the end of your turn you get to see the results of those decisions in a long scary list. Who’s succumbed to frostbite because you sent them out to hunt when they were already freezing cold? Who’s now malnourished because you wanted to cut down on rations to save food? Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.
In this way, The Pale Beyond has the usual flotsam and jetsam of management games, but the thing that really underpins it is the story and characters. This isn’t a story generator likeRimWorldorThis War Of Mine- there’s a string of story events that you follow throughout the game, complete with a cast of characters you get to know over time. The best comparison would be Stoic’s Viking RPGThe Banner Saga. So, yeah, there are characters who you’ll grow to love who could then potentially die, and it’ll be all your fault.
This is what I like to call the black screen of death.
Your crew manifesto is where you’ll find details about your crew, including how loyal they are you. A bit more scmoozing and Junior here will finally see me as a real captain ;_;
Playing politics with your crew is one tense aspect of the story, but there are also certain story beats that can potentially throw your journey into disarray. They’re gloriously dramatic, but also total game-enders if you’re not prepared. The Pale Beyond is not an easy game, and though I wouldn’t say it was Frostpunk-levels of gruelling, I decided multiple times to abandon my run and restart. Thankfully there’s an auto-save system, but it also doesn’t save for weeks at a time sometimes, which is frustrating for save scumming. But hey, since the story remains the same on restarts, you can fly through the story and dialogue to get to make careful changes where you like. You can get a ‘perfect run’ this way, because you know all the story events and important decisions to prepare for. My total playtime has been around 15 hours, but my best attempt start to finish has taken me around five.
I would love to leave the review here, but unfortunately, The Pale Beyond has some serious bug issues that riddled my build. Resource numbers would constantly change, some often turning invisible, a blank space in my inventory where they should have been. In a game where a single can of rations can mean life or death, having these hiccups pop up was always frustrating, especially when I was on a particularly great run. Hopefully, these are issues that can be fixed with a quick patch, but they’re annoying nonetheless. I almost wept when my number of coal bags kept dipping from nine to six.
With those bugs squashed, The Pale Beyond would be a stonking survival game. I love the attention to detail in the story and characters, which makes you want to hang in there not for the sake of beating the campaign, but because you genuinely want to spend more time with the crew - and find out the bigger mystery behind the missing ship. Next time I’m going to try and save every single person, and not just barely make it through with half my crew dead and the other half frostbitten and starving. I think it’s going to take me a while, though.
