 The age of the Earth's exploration, of its mapping rather, is long since over, yet the age in question continues to fascinate. Antarctic expeditions, those journeys into the most inhospitable climate on the surface of the planet, hold a special place in the public imagination. For millennia, European peoples believed and searched for an ice-free polar sea supposedly acting as a shortcut to the far side of the globe. And that's just the North Pole we're talking about. The Dutch navigator, Willem Berenz, went on three separate expeditions to find such a passage, immortalizing himself and his crew in the process. Harried first by the ice that had trapped their ship, and then by polar bears incapable of making their way home, Berenz and his crew were forced to spend the winter on the island of Nova Zembla. There they had a first-hand experience in learning what the pale beyond is willing to teach you frostbite-free. That lesson? The ice is cruel and uncaring. To explore it to first sail and then walk it, demands preparation, forethought. And Cajones, the size of that bizarre MSG sphere in Las Vegas. Desperation will do too. To whether the ice is too cold adversity. Know that there is no beating it, only surviving it. There is no other choice but to prepare with everything you've got. It won't be enough. The ice will always find ways to surprise you. When that happens, you'll have to trust you've got good people and enough of them at your side. This is where Balila Studios' debut title excels at. It peeples the pale beyond with good characters. It has to. This game is a narrative experience with engaging board game style survival mechanics. The gameplay loop consists of dialogue options and managing your crew in an attempt to survive on the ice. Catastrophe strikes early. When the ship you're a first mate on gets stuck in the ice. The crew is powerless to work the temperance free of its frosty grip and soon enough the choice becomes clear. Cling to the familiar way of ice on the ship and get crushed to death. Or venture the sudden arctic cold. Really, it's no choice at all. The setting of the pale beyond is a recognizable rendition of turn of the 20th century Britain, where capital is King. And the mysterious expedition to find the lost ship, the Vicount, is financed by an equally mysterious benefactor. The player character is first mate Robin Shaw, whose origins are up to you. Did he serve in the military? Was he a buccaneer? Highborn? Or born on the seas? Family man or a lone wolf? Those early choices don't change too much later on, but your crewmates will make note of it occasionally, and their perception of you might be affected by them. Before you know it, the temperance is off to the South Pole in the search for the Vicount. Captain Rufus Hunt, who hired you, is chill and likeable enough. Until the ship gets stuck in the ice, Hunt gets sloshed and promptly disappears. This leaves you to take his place as captain. Hold the crew together on the ice, survive and earn their loyalty. Braleonate everyone and let them die. It's up to you. You're a monster if you do that second thing, but the game gives you the freedom to be a monster. Still, the loop of the pale beyond aims to engage you with the crew at a deep enough level that you don't act like a murderous sociopath intent on speedrunning the deaths of everyone that's even only geographically close to you. The developer deserves compliments on the strength of their writing. It's damnably hard not to like most of the crewmembers that holds for everyone from the most important specialists on board to the crewmates whom you hardly ever interact with. I'll have to talk about the characters, won't I? Fine. Here goes. But I'll do it in song. I should break it up a little more. Templeton is a stickler for rules, and the fish is all bastard, although not as old as he looks, and he can be either the best of friends or the most odious of enemies. I suspect the latter, based on what I know of his character. I've never gone that far out with him because I genuinely like the guy. He's a nerd, a biologist and someone invested in the success of the expedition. Give him a reason to support your authority and he want flinch. If you want to earn his loyalty, you have to exercise. What's more, you have to make choices that prioritise the crew above any single crewmember. Kurt Darling is an old explorer whose fame has turned him into a solid great B movie star. Famous, eager to drink the full cup of life even as his age is catching up to him. Darling is a bear of a man and a gentleman, immensely likable, so there's no voice acting you know exactly what kind of voice he'd have. A warm booming baritone. Nothing like I can pull up. Behind it are a number of regrets. Behind the voice I mean, Darling reminds me of a character Virginia Woolf wrote in her to the lighthouse novel, Mr. Ramsey, a brilliant man in his way who needs validation from an external source. Kurt want bulk at the facts but show him kindness, show him understanding and he'll be your friend for life. The Stokes brothers as some of the captain's oldest crewmembers, fiercely loyal to Hunt, especially the elder brother, Grimes, they take work and planning to turn to your side. Junior is the easier to get along with. As first mates he spend a lot of time helping him add ingredients to the hooch, the food the crew subsists on. With both the rule is not to disparage Captain Hunt, but Grimes especially hates any reminder of your own authority. They appreciate you showing care for the crew and if you manage to earn their loyalty, you come to see some of the most satisfying scenes play out at the game's end. But I'll leave it at that, Grimes is a pain in the arse though so if you don't feel like earning his loyalty, I see you. Hammond is growth and has the lowest expectations in the world, beat them and you get to surprise the grump or don't and give him the gratification of every grouch at being proven right. Lady Cordell is a mysterious dog kennel owner and trainer, she's entrusting and does not consider herself a part of the crew, whether you try to change her mind or keep her walls up, is down to how you play sure, but earning her loyalty revealed one of the most delightful and complex characters across the entire game. I heart her. Karsha Belfort is a sharp journalist whose love for truth was inspired by Kurt Darlings' exploits. She's on the expedition to critical it and will take endless risks to accomplish the highest standards of truth. Journalistic excellence might as well be her middle name. Karsha is what journalists should be, what at least some of them aspire but fail to be, what many pretend to be while scrupulously breaking that social contract that we should hold them in ourselves too. Can you figure out how much I like her just yet? She's a bit of an idiot of course but all the best people are. As Dr. Nuttley as well, he shares quarters with Belfort for much of the game. She providing psychological aid in her amateur sleuth way, he providing medical services. Nuttley is the very model of the modern, read Victorian, or Edwardian, doctor gentleman. His nerves frayed, his capacity, wait is it Edwardian or Georgian, I think I'm thinking of Georgian, his nerves frayed, his capacity to survive the season certain, his family life marked by the bizarre weight of expectations, I mean his father is a barber for God's sake, the rule with Nuttley is, never try to play the role of stern truth saying to him, it'll go horribly, terribly wrong. Those are I think the big movers and shakers, whose loyalties you have to be on the look out for. You'll spend hours chatting with them, learning what makes their minds tick, fears and uncertainties, interests and passions, hopes for an unlikely future. The loss of them make for a memorable constellation of characters, I would be glad to spend more time with them even as a bygames end, I'd had enough of the pale beyond. The resource management boils down to three simple considerations, keep your people warm, keep them fed, make sure morale doesn't fall to the point where they'll string you up by your toes. It's easy on the ship, you've got an endless supply of coal and tins full of peaches. On the ice, once the ship is torn apart and your tins turn bad, you have to go hunting, exploring them up nearby, finding various hunting spots for different breeds of penguins and seals, as well as fish. It's not necessarily easy to begin with and it gets so much worse as the temperatures drop. The great challenge of the game is to properly prepare for the long winter, when venturing out into the cold will be equivalent to madness or at least a frostbite sentence for anyone you send hunting in a weather of minus 40 and under degrees Celsius. Oof-boof-boof, I don't know about you but I tend to wither whenever the thermostat drops below 23.99 degrees Celsius, stacking resources, choosing how much of your supply is to use every week, that requires planning. The higher the difficulty, the more planning and greater the care. On the current normal difficulty, the game is a lot more forgiving than it was when I first played it. That first difficulty has been relegated to the classical status and is still available for play, but as I had unknowingly abandoned my first play through a single week before winter's end, I decided to begin the game anew at the current default, normal difficulty. I had stopped playing previously because I'd gotten to the point where I was about to lose someone on the crew that I really didn't want to lose and that boned me out enough that I didn't want to keep going. Weird, I know, usually I'm a stickler for the consequences of my own actions, but this time around I had a gut reaction that wouldn't go away. The second time around, when winter came, I was ready. It's partly to do with understanding much better what is necessary to survive. I knew to get every item I could from the tempest that would make my hunting expeditions more fruitful. Further, the game was simply more forgiving. Less of my people would turn malnourished when I had provisions in half. Less of the people I sent out on expeditions would be freezing upon their return. I had to be careful, don't get me wrong, but as long as I was, the chances of losing someone due to resource mismanagement were slim to none. And if that's too easy, if you want the ice to treat you far worse, there's always the hard mode. It might not be the mode for me, but I'm sure it will find its proponents. And if you want those achievements, you'll be sure to dig in anyway. My fantasy was to be the first mate who rises to the occasion, fades in the cowardice of another, trusts upon him. Uncapable of making the right choices that saved 25 lives on the ice. Someone that befriends his crew members and earns their loyalty. That's what I got. The Pell Beyond was one of the pleasant surprises of last year. It's the work of Bellyler Studios, an offshoot of the Bellyler Games YouTube channel, which I've intermittently watched on and off for years. Ironically, I didn't find out about the game from the channel but came across its trailer at random and was enchanted by the promise of significant life or death choices. This game deserves praise for delivering on this promise all the way. It deserves praise for the tribute it offers to the world of yesteryear and the countless expeditions that sought to map the poles of our own world. Those real world inspirations are clear. So too are the elements of the otherworldly hinted at and seldom seen. Not Lovecraftian but certainly Uncanny, and all the more fascinating for it. Even if you find the gameplay loop simple or don't enjoy the management aspects of it. It's a none too bitter pill to swallow for the pleasure of the character's company. The quality of the art certainly eases things along, capturing the atmosphere of peril on the ice in a way that not even Frostbunk managed for me, not at so personal a level. Frostbunk was of course masterful at setting the stakes at the level of civilisation. The paleon is gorgeous in the way in which every piece of character art has this wedded, frayed look to it that nonetheless captures the essential quality of each character as they are written. That on its own is a significant accomplishment. There are some issues you will encounter the occasional error as far as dialogue presentation goes. Dramatical and punctuation mistakes are few enough, but more towards the end. I also received a few instances of getting interactions with characters that did not correspond or conform with the choices I had made. I think it only happened once or twice, but even that's once or twice too many for a narrative game of such ambition, right? With the paleon the shot, whether at full price or on sale it is well worth 8-10 hours of playtime and perhaps more. I left the game unfinished once and returned to it later, starting from scratch, making some better choices than the first time around. Perhaps next time, I'll do worse. So much worse. And so on. To learn more about Willem Barrens read A Riveting Essay by Andrea Pitzer on the New York Review of Books. You can also just shoot me a private message if you don't want to pay to get that pay wall down and maybe I can send you a little PDF, just saying. And of course the big thing is, as always, if you appreciated this video please don't forget to subscribe, smash that like button and leave a comment down below. Have you heard of The Pale Beyond? Are you planning on playing it? Have you played it already? Let me know what your impressions are. Is this kind of arctic expedition fantasy? Your thing, your cup of tea at all? I didn't expect it would be mine, but there it is. I loved it. And I'd love to hear more from you lot, so I'll see you soon again. And oh yeah, let me know, are there any games you'd like me to look at? Always open to suggestions as well. Anyway, I'm Philip Magnus, you're not. And I'll see you next time. Bye!