Beautiful Desolation Reviews
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 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.
Beautiful Desolation is a deep, intelligent, puzzle adventure presented with a unique isometric view. It's an easy recommendation to sci-fi fans who prefer narrative over action, but the Switch is not the best way to explore this apocalyptic world.
We were, as you can tell from the body of this review, consistently frustrated with Beautiful Desolation, another ambitious and lovely-looking game whose Switch incarnation just wasn't an acceptable way to experience it - shades of Genesis Noir's port (though that was better). It's especially unfortunate because this is exactly the sort of different that the Switch needs, but it needs to run better than what's on offer here. If you can muscle past the problematic controls, excessive loading and weak performance, you may be able to get into Beautiful Desolation. There is a lot to like in its worldbuilding, gorgeous backgrounds and interesting premise. But we felt like it just asked us to overlook way, way too many problems for the privilege.
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 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
I really appreciate what Beautiful Desolation is trying to do with creative storytelling; well-developed characters; and a mind-bending and beautiful, albeit desolate, sci-fi world. I just ended up too frustrated by the limitations of the console medium and a lack of direction in many of the quests to ultimately recommend this game on this platform. It's a point-and-click adventure presented without a pointer or a clicker, better played on PC.
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.
Beautiful Desolation is an enjoyable point and click adventure in a unique world, but the slow pace and obtusiveness may put some people off.
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.
By recovering and expanding stasis's game formula, Beautiful Desolation confirms The Brotherhood's talent for making point-and-click adventures that are appealing both narratively and aesthetically.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Even with the game environment being so desolate, there is still something rather beautiful – and this isn’t about the visuals, but the overall charm of the game and its characters. When I first heard of Beautiful Desolation I had expected a guns-blazing adrenaline-pumping RPG that would involve a high level of stress, but instead, I was given struggling human characters trying to find a way home with actual useful dialogue and choices that made a difference. Sure there is a lot of exploring, backtracking, and crying about finding items (eventually leading to searching online for hints and walkthroughs), but through it all, it was a journey that was worth experiencing – especially on a television screen.
Beautiful Desolation looks incredible and the world is unlike any other, but the gameplay and bugs can often spoil the fun.
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...
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.
I'm fairly sure that Beautiful Desolation is a decent game. This is a vast world clearly built with passion and with a keen attention to detail. Unfortunately, this console conversion is no way at all to experience The Brotherhood's latest. Awful pathfinding, so many invisible walls that if they were visible they could be seen from space, and clunky, unresponsive controls turn the fetch quest-heavy gameplay into a meandering slog.
Though a clunky UI and collection of surplus mini-games detract from Beautiful Desolation's evocative setting and characters, this is nonetheless one of the more interesting point and click adventures to come along for a good while. Not least thanks to its superbly imaginative take on a post apocalyptic future where the lines between humanity, evolution and immortality are deeply blurred. Even for the most stalwart adventurer, Beautiful Desolation's narrative and fresh premise will find a way to delight and surprise in equal measure.
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.