Beautiful Desolation Reviews
Considering its low price point, Beautiful Desolation delivers a big adventure with lots of depth to the wild story and fascinating world.
BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION offers a weird, and wonderful future of Earth to explore where you can make your mark. The journey is just as exciting and fantastic as the destination. There’s a unique world and game here that’s never been seen before, and THE BROTHERHOOD made sure of that. There’s nothing quite like BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION; it’s an experience you won’t soon forget, and is one of the finest adventure games I’ve ever played.
Beautiful Desolation is a good looking atmospheric game packed with ideas that sometimes suffers from almost trivial gameplay and sometimes from high level of challenge. It's evident a lot of work went into the title, but it required a firmer editorial hand that would smooth out the rough edges.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Beautiful Desolation may have some gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds, but its impenetrable plot, two-dimensional characters, maddening indirect quests, and cryptic puzzles make it very hard to recommend to anyone but diehard fans of obtuse point-and-click adventures.
BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION brings us a new classic graphic adventure, but this time with a touch of another genre that will give us variety. With certain aspects that could have been better adjusted, it is, however, a good option for lovers of the genre who want to enjoy it in its version for Nintendo Switch.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
I had high hopes for Beautiful Desolation, but this Switch version just doesn’t work very well at all. It’s absolutely gorgeous to look at, especially on a small screen, and its story is actually very compelling, but I felt I was struggling against its controls and egregious loading times throughout my entire time with it.
So overall, while it does a great job at telling the story of two brothers and their relationship for better or for worse which adds replayability to see how different decisions will impact it, Beautiful Desolation will not be for everyone. With some complex and often convoluted puzzles offering zero hints of how to proceed and often seemingly empty environments with nothing to do, it’s hard to recommend it to everyone, BUT, if you are a fan of well written narratives, cryptic puzzles, and some very well designed anything but human creatures, I wholeheartedly suggest taking a few cracks at this adventure and what it offers.
Two dimensional (2D) isometric titles have become incredibly common in recent years. Titles like Diablo, Gears Tactics, Bastion, Hades, and various Super Mario Role-playing Games, have proliferated the market and created certain expectations for the genre. Beautiful Desolation meets and exceeds what to expect from these kinds of games, and subsequently elevates the genre to new heights. It does so with a story imbued with alien technologies and time travelling elements, and further raises the bar for what should be expected from South African developed titles. The game is exceptional in many ways, and is a must play title.
"Brothers on edge of extinction."
Review in Finnish | Read full review
Beautiful Desolation begins in South Africa in the late 1980s. During a stormy drive home, we’re introduced to our main character Mark (A Richard Branson, circa 1990s looking gentleman) and his wife driving home during a thunderous monsoon-like storm. Almost immediately an earth-shattering event rocks the very foundations of Mark’s (and the rest of the world’s) life when a mysterious triangular object appears in the sky dubbed “The Penrose” changes society and technology as they know it forever. Flash forward multiple years and with the confirmation that Mark’s wife didn’t survive the prologue of the story, Mark is now hellbent on solving the mystery of “The Penrose” using the help of his Brother and a robotic guard dog, be it for either revenge, curiosity or perhaps fate?
Beautiful Desolation is a decent isometric game with outstanding voice acting featuring South African dialects and slang, amazing environment art and a gripping story. It will not be for everyone and is more of a slow burn story progression which suits me just fine as a gaming dad with limited time.
First glances at the pre-rendered backgrounds and plain look and feel of Beautiful Desolation brought a bit of a thrilling feeling to me as a classic PC gamer, making me hope for the likes of classic Fallout or Wasteland...
Beautiful Desolation is not a perfect game by all means. But damn, its atmospheric world and crazy, grotesque citizens are stealing the show, forcing you to beat the game just to see how many strange creatures you can meet along the way.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Regrettably, the Switch port just isn't up to par. Between long loading and controls that border on unusable, playing it is ultimately frustrating. While I appreciate the effort to adapt from PC to console, in this instance the change just doesn't work with the existing structure.
Beautiful Desolation raises a lot of questions but leaves the answers open for most of the time. It is an experience that makes you wonder about humanity and what the future will bring. It is fun only for those who are looking for deep-reaching experiences, that will stick with you long after you finished the game.
Beautiful Desolation is an exciting blend of point-and-click adventure and classic isometric RPG. The game features a well-written story that sets place in a bizarre world that is somehow familiar and strange at the same time. There are some problems with the game's RPG elements, and the control system is not well implemented in console versions. Anyways, it is an interesting game with a good story and beautiful audio-visual experience, which I can recommend to that point and click fans.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Beautiful Desolation is a very unique and different kind of adventure game. It has a tremendous amount of respect for the player to figure things out, but also has little respect for their time too. The writing is very engaging, and the acting is surprisingly exceptional. The South African flavour of the cast adds a ton of personality to the experience; Mark and Don's chemistry feels very real, and their slang and colloquialisms make them very unlikely video game characters. They're both schlubby guys in their '40s, and even POOCH manages to have a great deal of humanity to her character, despite being a robot dog.xploring a post apocalyptic cyber-nightmare South Africa, while solving puzzles and talking to religious robots and using diplomacy to diffuse warring factions without any combat sounds like a fun time, then Beautiful Desolation is that kind of game. The experience is held together with amazing looking backdrops, freakish cyborgs to converse with and movie quality CGI cutscenes. This is not an RPG, but it is a highly creative and imaginative adventure game that has some spotty controls and overly cryptic puzzles.
Beautiful Desolation is an old-school 2D isometric adventure, but like Stasis it's the story the true focus.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Beautiful Desolation is a 2D isometric point and click adventure set in a post-apocalyptic future. Developed and published by The Brotherhood games, Beautiful Desolation provides a unique story and world design for the fans of the genre. Follow the adventures of Mike Leslie and his companions, to figure out what's going on with the future they have found themselves in, and discover a way to go back.
Beautiful Desolation looks incredible and the world is unlike any other, but the gameplay and bugs can often spoil the fun.