Summary

The Pale Beyond is a survival management RPG developed by Bellular Studios and published by Fellow Traveler in early 2023. You play as the First Mate of a crew on an Antarctic expedition. You have to manage the crew's food, supplies, and morale in order to survive the treacherous ice.

I've always had a personal interest in remote places, such as the poles. And so have found the exploration of these areas quite fascinating. So I was immediately intrigued when steam recommended the game to me. I expect this one to be equal parts anxiety and fascination-inducing.

Review

Gorgeous game full of a lot of heart. I'm a fan of visual novels. In general, I have more of an appetite for a somewhat interactive story delivered largely through text than, I think, the average gamer is. I enjoy well-written stories and writing is a consistently weaker area in games I feel. So I get an occasional desire to delve into a genre that effuses gameplay in favor of focusing on the writing. But Pale Beyond doesn't need to pass that check, because it has more than enough interesting gameplay to satisfy the gamer closer to the mean than I.

In Pale Beyond you play as Robin Shaw, first mate and soon-to-be acting captain. You must lead the crew of the Temperance through an arctic expedition turned survival situation. Each week, you assign your crew members various resource-gathering tasks, allocate what little resources you do have, and decide on how to handle the exceptional circumstances that come up in such an unforgiving environment. (Do we stay in this area and hunt while we can or move to a place of safety where the ice is thicker? Winter's comin'...) The decisions always feel appropriately consequential and as you get to know each of the crew members of the Temperance, those decisions become all the more harrowing. It's genuinely distressful seeing your resources dwindle week after week because of bad decisions you made, as your plucky band of rogues inches closer to an icy grave.

In my playthrough, I essentially did two runs. The first was totally blind and ended during the proper winter "Long Dark" period just before Pale gets into its endgame sequence. I made a number of poor decisions and genuine mistakes in the first couple weeks that just snowballed and left me without many options come winter-time. It's possible I could have rewound a couple of weeks and eeked out a win with some different decision-making, but I knew most of my most dire mistakes were in the beginning of the game. And I also wasn't aware how close I was to the endgame (where resources would no longer really be a concern). So, armed with knowledge, I went back to the drawing board and started the second run from the beginning. This one went WAY better than the 1st one and revealed that the game is pretty well-balanced all things considered. They give you more than enough rope to hang yourself, which I did with glee. Given how the end of the game goes, I think the most ideal playthrough would be to do not quite as poorly I did. But to make enough mistakes that over the course of the game you lose a couple of people by the time you make it to Viscount Island. Then given the knowledge you gain there, you could go back, right all your wrongs, and get everyone through it successfully. That's essentially what happened to me, but if I had made it to the endgame on my first run, that all could have happened in-universe, rather than just out-game knowledge. I don't necessarily hold it against the game. My mistakes are what led to that outcome. It's just my expectation that the designers are hoping that the scenario I describe fits the player's experience. Where the first time they make it to Hunt is one in which they've lost several of the crew. I think that is the path they are funneling you down.

Let's talk about what we actually find at Viscount Island, because I'm mightily intrigued. And we never really get a full answer to everything, even after delving through the various endings. So I wanted to get my own thoughts and theories out. At the Viscount, we find Hunt and he gives us the fruit of knowledge that he's been eating each time he makes it to the Viscount himself. The fruit makes you a 4 dimensional man able to go back and make different decisions in the past and split off the timeline. Hunt has been doing this dozens of times attempting to find someone who can successfully get the crew to safety after the Temperance is stuck in the ice. So he's been time-looping for years before we get to the beginning of the game with Shaw's interview. I'd suspected there was some shenanigans happening after beginning my 2nd run and I paid closer attention to everything Hunt says before he and the other crew go missing. It's all well sign-posted but still very satisfying when confirmed in the Viscount.

The actual nature of the fruit and the tree, I'm happy to stay ambiguous. Finding inexplicable things at the edge of the world is great stuff and I don't need a complete explanation of what it is and how it works. Obviously, the symbolism being conveyed is pretty clear. A tempter offering a fruit from a tree that grants knowledge is well-founded. But as far as we are concerned, it is a plant, it simply is. Perhaps it is calling out to others, wanting to do what any organism does and persist. And thus it wants us to take it back to civilization and out of the terrible cold. Perhaps. What I'm most curious about is Minerva Appertton and how exactly we knew the fruit was here in the first place. What we are told from Templeton and Hunt is that the Viscount expedition was a scientific endeavor by the government. And that after a survivor of the expedition is able to relay some information about what was found at the South Pole before dying, the second expedition of the Temperance is planned and funded by the Apperttons. I'm very curious who exactly the survivor of the Viscount expedition is, but I don't think we ever get follow-up on it. Now, I can buy that. But I think a rather interesting detail that goes unremarked upon is the can itself. Templeton shows us the logo of the Apperttons on the tinned cans we were given for supplies two times. There clear as day is the very fruit we're chasing after in Minerva's hands.

An aside. As said before, obviously we're working with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil as far as symbolism goes. Though the fruit on the Viscount looks very much like a peach and not an apple. And they do explicitly state that the canned fruit is peaches. But Hunt, and the game's interface, simply refer to it as a "fruit". So I just call it as such. An aside to the aside, though we typically refer to the fruit in Genesis as an apple, there's alternate translations (as there is for literally any myth from this period.) where the fruit was perhaps a grape or a pomegranate. Any fruit'll do.

This could just be a clever bit of foreshadowing. The fruit being used as a symbol of desire and indulgence. But it's not the only time you see the fruit prior to speaking with Hunt. You actually see it in the very beginning of the game, in the interview with Hunt. On the wall of the office is a mostly covered-up portrait of Minerva Appertton. And what is she holding here? Once again, the fruit. It seems odd to have this symbol of her holding the literal object we're after recur multiple times in the game and have it purely be symbolic. The Viscount is said to have disappeared a few years before the game begins. So what's going on with this recurring imagery of her holding the fruit? We know it's been around for at least a few decades given we meet Minerva personally and can see the age difference between her and the portrait/can image. Well before the Viscount happened...

I wonder if perhaps Minerva is a four dimensional woman as well? There is the ending where we bring the tree and its fruit back. Has she eaten of it? Surely, right? Why else go through all the trouble to get it. And if she has, are we dealing with a time loop within a time loop? Minerva eats of the fruit and uses its symbol to represent her company well in the past with a vague memory that she (may) get it in the future. The Appertton company is clearly doing well for itself. Templeton says they have their fingers in many pies. Perhaps that's led largely with Minerva's knowledge of the future? Wild that any of this is in a game that is ostensibly about just surviving an arctic environment. But there it is, and so I have to question the larger picture of what all is going on. She's willing to come to the south pole herself. If she's personally familiar with the fruit's power, that would make a lot more sense.

I'm left wondering if there will ever be any followup on this plot thread. A sequel or spinoff or something. Some novelization would be nice. It's really intriguing, but I'm not even sure how you broach it without going into the Zero Escape time travel insanity land^[1]. If my reading here is even correct. If it is though, I have to say, this is easily one of the biggest examples of burying the lede I've seen. I had no idea of any of this was in the game at all. Great stuff. Really enjoyed the game and the thoughts it left me with afterward.

Links

Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXbBIoFOxaQtVW36Z49mUofP3cKQQv9xO