Beneath A Steel Sky: Clever

I'm working on a sci-fi adventure game at the moment, and as part of the development process I've been "researching" 1994's Beneath A Steel Sky on my iPhone.

I finished it last night, and I'd highly recommend giving it a play - it's got some great ideas. There are sections where you enter this kind of "cyberspace", where the gameplay is very similar to other sections (use item on other item) but with a software theme - you have to perform certain commands, like decrypting documents, using "passwords" to navigate a puzzle and applying a security countermeasure to a big floating eye to stop it from logging you out when you try to access a restricted area.

You also have different keycards that gain you access to different sections of a network called "LINC" - kind of like a domain, or a BBS - and you use them to open security doors, to deliver a virus into a system, etc. At one point you have to use the capabilities of one card to gain access to an area in cyberspace, and then switch to a different card/profile in order to utilise the thing found in that area.

Another novel gameplay element is the use of the main character's robot sidekick, Joey - you have to keep retrieving his circuit board and putting it into new "shells" because they keep getting destroyed by this or that, and each shell has different capabilities. You also rely on him to get into restricted areas, and to give you advice on things you pick up, though the advice would often take the form of sarcastic condescension - good to keep things spicy.

The whole game, though far from perfect in terms of logical puzzle design, struck me as rather imaginative, especially in terms of capitalising on its "cyber" themes for advancing the gameplay. I really appreciated the fact that a single item would often gain the player access to an entire section of gameplay - you didn't often come across a random item that you picked up simply because you could, and that you would use in an obscure scenario two hours' later. There were instances of that, but overall there was a sense of cohesion in the gameplay - objects in your inventory weren't just once-off novelty things that weighed down the trial-and-error gameplay, they were a gateway into a realm of puzzle-solving possibilities.