Danger at every turn, and a ship trapped in ice. A missing captain and some of the crew gone. What do we do now Captain?

The Pale Beyond is a whimsical but brutally tough resource management survival sim, with a gorgeous hand drawn aesthetic and a deeply involved system of choices and outcomes. You play as Robin, a man brought onto a voyage into the deep ice in search of a ghost ship, long thought to be lost. Mere weeks into your trip as the First Mate of the ship, everything is flipped on its head. Trapped in the ice, the captain and part of the crew go missing overnight. You are thrust into a leadership role you weren’t ready for, but that is only the simple stuff, now comes the hard part.

The Pale Beyond is an extremely tight and well put together resource management sim. Early on you are given three simple mechanics to deal with, that snowball themselves into an ever spiralling whirlpool of despair and potential demise. After you are just barely voted in as the new Captain, you have to keep the crew alive, decide how to spend your meagre resources, whilst also keeping their morale up, free of scurvy and stopping the encroaching frostbite of the freezing cold. On top of this, your crew is broken up into a series of different specialties. Scouts, engineer, scientists, general sailors and even a pack of sled dogs to manage. The Pale Beyond doesn’t do much for easing you into this state of control either. This works in its favour however, as it teaches you a fundamental rule very early on. Sometimes people will have to go cold, or sick. Sometimes people will have to do jobs outside of their speciality, and sometimes people will die.

Further to this, the game adds a loyalty mechanic as well. When you are voted in as captain, you do so only with a very slight majority. The crew themselves are loyal to their heads of each section, and a lot of the crew had previously sailed with the now missing captain. So on top of keeping decorum up, feeding the boiler and feeding the bellies, you also have to build the loyalty levels of the important crew members, because not everything is as simple as being voted in once. You’re a fake captain, and any member of the crew who reads their employment contract will know this. You can lose the loyalty of those who voted for you, sway those who abstained and gain the loyalty of the crew who refused to give up on the AWOL Captain Hunt. All of these systems meld together seamlessly. Of course, you will have to make decisions that will likely make one person happy, whilst making others sad. This will take multiple attempts, and you will find yourself in drastically different positions depending on the choices you make.

Where The Pale Beyond really shines is the visual design. The entire game looks like it could be a painting or gorgeously cared for hand drawn water colour. The simplistic designs add a grittiness to the game that accentuates the world you’re inhabiting. The characters are scruffy and rag tag. Sailors of experience, scientists who have spent their lives living in comfort, and aging seafarers who are beginning to slow down. Each and every character is uniquely designed, with every character being unique and are instantly recognisable, and it is through these little details of care, that the crew comes truly to life. On top of this, every character has their own origins, personalities and desires. You will need to know your crew inside and out to truly understand their motives and what you need to do to excel as their captain.

The culmination of all this, is a game that is a brutally tough experience. The Pale Beyond is easily one of the most punishing survival resource management games I’ve played. There are daily choices to make, a constant need to be hunting food and fuel, having to balance the relationship building as well as the feasibility of giving in to the whims and desires of your crew, or ultimately making that hard choice. Death is a constant risk, and death will claim your crew many times before you finally reach the ending. The more you progress, the better you’ll get at making these decisions. Yet there is a level of RNG always at play. Characters will develop scurvy, frostbite or become disillusioned with everything that is happening. You’ll then have to sacrifice resources and people to deal with these people, meaning you run the risk of falling behind. The more you play, and the more you use the branching save tree, the more you’ll improve. But the difficulty is an ever looming aspect, and if you aren’t a fan of high-stress high-stakes gameplay, you may find The Pale Beyond far less enjoyable than the game truly is.

The difficulty factor definitely makes it hard to truly estimate the amount of gameplay you’ll get here. With a save system that allows you to go back to major choices in the storyline (but none of the steps leading up to it), you’ve always got a chance to go back a significant amount to fix issues and focus more on resources that you are lacking at a later point. For most people, I would assume the twenty to twenty five hour mark will be what you will get out of the game. For those who are better with resource management games than I am, they’ll see the ending in probably closer to ten hours, but this will definitely vary on your choices, the RNG outcomes and your choices in potential situations that may kill of key members of your crew, The Pale Beyond is a game with a fair bit to offer.

The Pale Beyond is a very unique, deeply thought out, and a project full of love and passion. Brutally tough, whilst never feeling unfair due to the system allowing you to succeed with some better understanding and thought out decisions. The more time you spend with the game, the better you’ll get at it. This is a game I would very much like to see a Switch version of in future, as I believe the scope of the game lends itself to being a very good road trip game. A gorgeously crafted world and story, full of difficult choices, heartbreaking decisions and a warmth in learning more of the characters at your hand, The Pale Beyond is a great little game to start the year off. This is a fantastically crafted first game from Bellular Studios and definitely puts them on the radar for future titles.