Sunday Musings - Beneath A Steel Sky
To follow up on last week's Lure of the Temptress, it seemed only fittting to write up a Musings on the superior and quite frankly unbeatable Beneath A Steel Sky. As always, the idea behind a Sunday Musings is that Adam takes a concept and times an hour to write it in. This week, we get cyberpunk....
Beneath a Steel Sky is a masterpiece. Simple as. It's the second album that strikes higher than it's predecessor. Its an Aliens. A Ride the Lightning . Every risk the game's creation is worthwhile to make the greater whole. The dystopian cyberpunk point and click balances out the harder edges of it's genre with some truly laugh out loud humour (and groanworthy puns), and that balance is flawless. There is joy of language that runs throughout the game as you delve into Union City. A large chunk of that comes from the main character and his robotic sidekick, Robert Foster and Joey. as they learn about the city they are so new to.
Joey
Stay away from him, Rob! He’s a human BOMB!
Foster
What ARE you talking about?
Joey
He’s got a FUSE in his MOUTH!
Foster
That’s a CIGARETTE.
He’s inhaling the SMOKE for PLEASURE!
Joey
Get SERIOUS, Foster
This is cyberpunk through and through however, in the time before the genre failed to keep up with reality. The game brings Robert to Union City via a helicopter crash and move ever closer to the lower levels which, in a sublime twist, is where the elites live, far from the polluted skies that the masses dwell upon. Against this grim backdrop the jokes run quick and very human, It's how we as a species deal with tragedy and horror, the Steel Sky's inhabitants wear such humanity on thier sleeve with puns and pithy one-liners. The cyberpunk themes you expect are all front and centre, with class conflict and a AI in charge. A dalliance into Cyberspace changes the game into a labyrinthine head cracker of an experience, where the logic of the puzzles in "real" are replaced with unintuitive frustrations, which contrasts very nicely considering the story it tells. .
The main thrust of cyberpunk comes with the theme of Body Autonomy, branching into and through augmentation and into the conflict of where man ends and machine begins. Robert, being the noble savage, needs to have this explained and has visceral reactions to what he sees and experiences. Joey however, adapts and changes throughout the game moving from shells and bodies until he becomes the meeting point of the two and transforms into Ken, the saviour of Union City, able to do what Joey and Foster could not.
Charles Cecil and famed artist Dave Gibbons brought more to Steel Sky than I can cover here, but know that I class this as the pinnacle of both Point and Click AND cyberpunk games. It's a majestic beast that deserves to be remembered as such.