The Pale Beyond Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

The Pale Beyond Free Download GAMESPACK.NET You know it’s a great turn in The Pale Beyond when 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’s survival sim as just ‘Frostpunk on 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 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. TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

The Pale Beyond Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Cool, cool, cool, no problem at all. It’s a mission that feels doomed from the start. The fate of this ship was sealed as soon as it left the dock. What quickly started as a research and rescue mission is now one of survival, and all because some mysterious benefactor had enough cash to pay some desperate sailors to chase a myth. It’s a gripping set-up, and is only made more chilling with the opening text when you boot up the game: “This game contains mature themes inspired by the real historical experiences of polar explorers.” It really gets you in the right mindset for a poignant story about human endurance – but also misery, so much misery. 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 resource management is 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.

A bit more scmoozing and Junior here will finally see me as a real captain

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 like RimWorld or This 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 RPG The 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. Forming relationships with your crew is incredibly important. When the captain went missing, there was a vote for who would take his place, and you won by only a single ballot, so that’s the worrying position to be in. Each member of the core crew (around eight of the total 20) has a scale showing their loyalty to you, and their underlings will following wherever their boss lies. Having conversations with them and picking the right dialogue options, as well as doing them favours and agreeing with their requests, will slowly build up points to get them onside. Piss them off, though, and they’ll lose loyalty. Imagine Hammond, the ship’s lead engineer has three other engineers working under him who will all follow his lead – which is good, because currently his loyalty lies with you. But you end up killing one of his team in an artic outing, and then stop him from burning books as fuel for the generator. Low and behold, his loyalty drops. Aimbeast 

The Pale Beyond Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

This all ties in with general crew morale too, represented by a meter in the bottom left of the screen. If you make a decision that someone doesn’t appreciate, like confiscating a box of choccy biscuits someone had stowed away, they might not only lose loyalty but become demoralised too, which decreases the crew’s overall morale rating. Just like with food and fuel, if that reaches zero it’s game over. This relationship system has a lot of weight attached to it because – and please don’t tell the other captains about this – it informs your more… difficult decisions regarding the crew. If I can only send a single person to the doctor but have two people with frostbite, sorry, but it’s not going to be the guy who, by association, is loyal to the old captain who up and did a runner. It’s terrible, but it’s true! You have to think tactically about who to prioritise, and, outside of their jobs, crew loyalty can be the deal breaker. In other survival sims, I just assigned nameless workers to whatever horrible job needs doing, but in The Pale Beyond I had to weigh up my options differently. I had to look directly into the eyes of a character’s portrait as I toldl them to go hunt for penguins even though they’re totally going to get frostbite and die. As you play further into the game, all the characters, even the ones that hate your guts, grow on you. Grimley, one of two brothers on board, couldn’t stand the sight of me at first, and even made up rude songs that the crew would sing, all about how I was a terrible captain with a frozen arse.

This is what I like to call the black screen of death

But I still wound up liking him. I like that he loves playing his accordian, and how he worries about his brother; heck, I even like his unwavering loyalty to the other captain even after weeks of him not returning. The Kennel Master, Cordell, is completely closed off and prefers the company of her dogs to people, but after slowly getting to know her it turns out she’s massively into theatre, and now I love her even more. There are loads of little stories, like one crew member teaching another how to read, Harold Turner who goes by ‘Leftie’ because of his missing eye, and a father and son duo who I refused to let either of them die, because they’re family. It’s emotional blackmail, I tell you! Decisions are hard not because you’re losing workers, they’re hard because you’re losing characters who you’ve made connections with. 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 Airheart Tales of Broken Wings Switch NSP

The Pale Beyond Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

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.

A stow away means an extra mouth to feed might turn out for the best later down the line

The Pale Beyond is a narrative survival game. As acting captain, you need to manage the crew’s food, heat, morale, and loyalty week to week so no one dies. Rescue will arrive in about 30 weeks, and there will be many twists and turns as the pale tries to kill you all. If you don’t have enough food to go around, characters will become malnourished, eventually progressing to scurvy and then death. If the furnace’s temperature is too low people will become frozen, develop frostbite and then – you guessed it – die of it. The general game flow goes like this: you start the week taking requests, assign crew members to their tasks, call everyone to dinner, then advance to the next week. You need to manage all your resources wisely, because sending groups out hunting or scavenging on the ice can only get you so much. If morale gets too low, however, then it’s your head on the chopping block. Surviving is just as important as trust here. As acting captain, each week you’ll take requests and assign tasks to the crew. You’ll mostly be receiving requests from the specialists of the team.These characters are more fleshed out than the rest of the crew, like the head engineer, particularly influential sailors, the kennel master, and more. We’ll talk more about the characters themselves later, but for now all you need to know is that completing their requests, anything from setting aside some food for a holiday feast to locking the camp down early for the winter, will increase that character’s loyalty. Akai Katana Shin Switch XCI

The Pale Beyond Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Without spoiling anything, if a character is loyal to you they will side with you in certain story events, as will anyone loyal to them in turn. You can’t bow to every whim obviously, as some will even conflict, but a good captain understands when to spend and when to save. There are a variety of things you can assign crew members to do for the week, though some tasks require someone trained in something like scouting or engineering. For example, let’s say you want to assign four sailors to hunt penguins that week. You’ll first need to scout out a location on the map by sending out a scout and three sled dogs. They’ll come back quickly, but you won’t be able to use the scout nor the dogs for the rest of the week. After discovering a place with penguins, you’ll then need to choose how many you want to send hunting, from one to four, and the group will need four more sled dogs. Once the week ends, they’ll come back with food/fuel but also probably be freezing, so the next week you’ll probably want that group to stay in the medical tent and warm up. Practically everything affects your crew’s status in ways you can usually predict so planning weeks in advance so no one is left to freeze to death is a must. Scouting and hunting are the most common activities to assign, but there are also a few more you have access to depending on the situation. If some people are sick, you can assign them to rest in the infirmary for the week. They won’t contribute any resources and become unavailable for other tasks, but they won’t die. Probably.

You can get around that unavailability by using a medical cure, created by assigning all three scientists to do so for a week. If a character’s morale gets particularly low, you can send them to interview with the journalist who’s documenting the voyage and their mood will perk up. Lastly, aside from some special requests, you can send your two engineers to crank up the heat, which will randomly cure some crew members of freezing. As you continue to survive on the ice, the overall story will continue no matter what, with big events happening at set times throughout the game. These are things like needing to move camp because the ice is breaking up or enclosing the camp in canvas to survive the winter. These events will alter your available resources in some way, like not being able to hunt during winter. While I did somehow get through the game without anyone dying, it wasn’t easy. The Pale Beyond is brutal; just when I thought the situation couldn’t get worse something would completely flip the situation on its head again. There’s a story event later on that is absolutely heartbreaking entirely due to your decisions, but it really earns that moment. It’s a lot of fun in a survival game to just barely skirt by, and that is a balance The Pale Beyond perfectly walks. You are constantly managing what little resources you have along with the well being of your crew, making sure you never run out of food and fuel while also strategically assigning tasks and rest periods. It’s a lot of stressful fun. Especially once you factor in earning the loyalty of all the specialists and getting to know them.

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: The Pale Beyond