Are The Clouds Iron?

This week, I decided to try out Beneath A Steel Sky, which uses the ScummVM virtual machine. Both are apt-getable if you happen to use Debian.

Overall, the game has me quite interested. I've always been a fan of point and click graphic adventures so, since that's what this game is, we get along fairly well together. The game came out back in 1994, so by today's standards it's nothing that you're going to lose bowel control over, but that's mostly to be expected. That aside, the art style of the game has an undeniably cool look.

The fact that the original resolution of the Beneath A Steel Sky was so low means that, if you can stand it, it's one of the few games out there that really should be played in windowed mode. On my monitor at least, blowing it up to fullscreen almost completely strips the visual appeal. While a game this old has got to start showing it's age at some point, it's actually surprising how well most of the visuals hold up.

The sound is a different thing all together. See, there was a time when voice acting in a videogame was cool because it was there, not because A-list voice actors were being hired to voice the characters. The part that I find strange is how bad the main character's voice acting is. While certain members of the supporting cast obviously knew a little bit about what they were doing, he sounds entirely emotion-less.

Anyway, the game is fairly large(around 70MB) for an older game of it's ilk, so 56k-ers may be more inclined to go for something else, but even then, it's still worth it.