Beneath a Steel Sky: in Union City, the poor live up high and the rich hide underground

A stranger with no explanation for his own abduction, a sarcastic robotic circuit board as his only ally, and more than a hundred backdrops drawn by the creator of Watchmen.

A city turned upside down

Robert Foster wakes up in Union City with no idea why he was brought there. In this vertical city, the usual order is inverted: the poor are packed into towers at the top, exposed to everything, while the rich and powerful live underground, shielded even from the dirty air. Alone, with a robotic circuit board as his only company, you guide Foster through a wary population, unstable criminals and a power-hungry corporation — and you have to find out what happened to him before he becomes just another number in the machine.

The game belongs to Revolution Software, credited with both its creation and its distribution. The version added to this catalogue is dated 18 December 2008, but the story began much earlier: the original title dates from 1994. Getting through the city means clicking on every corner of more than a hundred backdrops — all drawn by Dave Gibbons, the English cartoonist famous for Watchmen, who also turned the game's own plot into a comic included in the package. The residents don't stand around waiting for you: each character moves about and follows their own routine, a system the studio named Virtual Theatre.

Closer to a book than a game

Those who wrote about the game on the very day this version launched, 18 December 2008, sum up the experience as more like reading a novel than playing one: the story and the dialogue carry the weight, not the challenges. The same view comes back a few days later, in a review from 6 January 2009 that calls the game an all-time favourite and puts the result down to a dark sense of humour — a sarcastic robotic circuit board that insults Foster whenever it can, a doctor addicted to helium, a fanatical insurance salesman — set against a suffocating futuristic backdrop. It's that contrast, they say, that makes you laugh at the exact moment the city ought to do nothing but unsettle you.

Not every bit of praise comes without a caveat. A review from 8 December 2013 compares the game to Broken Sword, another piece of work by the same team, and finds it more modest: it points to stretches where solving one obstacle only reveals the next, with no hint that you were meant to go back to a room you'd already visited. Even so, it recommends the game. The harshest criticism here doesn't come from someone who hated it — it comes from someone playing it again.

Objects too small, deaths too quick

Dissenting voices are rare in what the dossier gathers, and the sharpest is from October 2011. It calls the game a classic, but lists what grates: essential items so small on screen that they vanish into the backdrop — a lump of putty on the floor, a pair of pliers propped against the wall — leaving you to comb every inch of the picture for a detail that should have been obvious. The actions demand blind faith too: they work only if you obey without understanding why, and whole passages open up only after a conversation somewhere else on the map, with no sign that this was what was missing. There are also several ways to die, some avoidable only by running the cursor across the screen in time, which nudges you into saving the game constantly.

For slow readers, not for those out to solve it fast

The very pace that earns praise from anyone treating the game as a novel is what irritates anyone who just wanted to move on: a city that rewards looking into every corner punishes whoever doesn't examine every corner. You feel it within the first few minutes: either you accept standing still and reading every detail of the scene, or you give up at the first locked door left unexplained. It suits anyone who likes to rummage scene by scene, read every line of dialogue and accept that the answer to a puzzle may lie on the other side of the map. It doesn't suit anyone after straightforward logic with no backtracking: whoever tries to rush Foster's city dies without warning and curses the pliers they never spotted on the wall.