In Beyond a Steel Sky, the citizens of the utopian Union City win and lose points according to their civic behaviour, building an aggregate that measures their social standing. This “Qdos” system, as it’s called, might once have seemed like the product of an authoritarian fever dream. Today, however, it mirrors the reality of China’s controversial social credit system, whereby all aspects of its citizens’ behaviour are monitored and incentivised, with high scorers enjoying reduced waiting times at hospitals, hotel discounts and broader employment opportunities, while low scorers are publicly shamed.
And yet this sequel to 1994’s Beneath a Steel Sky, a collaboration between Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons and the York-based design team Revolution Software, still classifies as science fiction in the orthodox sense of presenting the social divides of a futuristic world, not merely its neon-lit and mohawked aesthetic, as is the case with so much current sci-fi.
You play as Robert Foster, an out-of-towner who, in order to enter the city, steals the ID chip from a body he finds in the desert. Foster has promised a young mother that he will track down her kidnapped child, and pans for clues by chatting with the locals, who range from urchins to lorry drivers to snippy droids, before running errands to solve their micro-dramas in return for their assistance in his quest.
As players of Revolution’s classic Broken Sword series might expect, this is a world of nested puzzles; each breakthrough is always met by some new, arcane resistance. The incessant challenge could be offputting were it not for the quality of the writing, which is thoroughly witty and engaging throughout.
Soon, Foster acquires a device that enables him to hack into everything from automated bridges to drinks machines and rewrite their internal logic to, for example, dispense free cans of soda, adding a technical dimension to the puzzle wrangling. Unfortunately the game has a few logic issues of its own. A handful of bugs, including one that breaks the game and forces you to retreat to earlier saves, threatens the delicate relationship of trust that exists between player and designer, as each time you get stuck, you question whether the fault lies with your reasoning or simply a glitch. Patches will, no doubt, quickly fix the issues, at which point Beyond a Steel Sky will join its stablemates as a modern classic.
