- Game: Hiding Spot Games's Beacon Pines.
- Release Month: September.
- Quick Look: N/A.
- Started: 28/01.
- Completed: 29/01.
There's much about 2022's video game bona fides I've yet to discover for myself—my parsimonious nature rarely lets me buy games new—but I think it's safe to say that as far as adventure games go it was an exceptional year, whether your poison is for traditional point-and-click adventure games (Norco, Return to Monkey Island) or those bolted onto a secondary game mode that largely serves to enhance the storytelling (Signalis, Citizen Sleeper) or even something a bit more narrative-focused like this game, Beacon Pines. (Heck, I haven't even played two of the year's biggest yet: Wadjet/Cloak & Dagger Games's The Excavation of Hob's Barrow and Obsidian's Pentiment.)
Beacon Pines puts you in the sneakers of twelve-year-old would-be adventurer Luka VanHorn, a child who hasn't let a string of recent family tragedies dampen his gregarious and resourceful attitude towards his unhurried life in the small town that lends the game its name. Oddly enough it turns out Beacon Pines is a goldmine for the precociously adventurous, as it has a sordid history and a great many long-buried mysteries to discover. After finding himself unexpectedly embroiled in a conspiracy involving the sinister Perennial Harvest corporation and the wealthy descendants of the town's founder, Sharper Valentine, Luka takes it upon himself (along with his best friend Rolo Cotter and new girl Beck Moedwil) to dig deeper into what's been happening under everyone's noses.
In lieu of traditional adventure game puzzles revolving around inventory objects or IQ test brainteasers Beacon Pines takes a leaf from the adjacent visual novel genre to create branching paths in the story that the player influences with "charms": a series of narrative concepts such as "chill" or "malice" that the player acquires organically throughout the playthrough that can be applied at split decisions to push the story in a certain direction. All but one of these branches concludes in a premature, usually fatal ending but at the very least offers important information and story details that the player can use to piece together the larger plot as they work through the other branches. These routes often provide charms as well, opening up new paths from previous splits: it's through this system that the game can carefully control the narrative flow and reveal details to the player when they're ready to hear them. The last game I played with this structure was Kemco's excellent Werewolf-inspired VN Raging Loop, though a slightly less obscure example might be something like the first (and presumably the second) AI: The Somnium Files, and it does this great job of shepherding the player from one false end to the next without feeling too much like you're being just as railroaded as you would be if the events were presented in a strictly chronological order.
The game's also a real looker, with these very detailed locations and character portraits that goes for an incongruously cute anthro style considering how occasionally suspenseful and bleak the narrative can be. It'd be easy to mistake the game from first blush as something meant for little kids while in actuality it errs a bit closer to YA territory, dealing with themes like the loss of family, corporate greed, murder, and the end of the world as we know it. It's a game that certainly throws you for a loop more than once during its storyline, though like Norco it's not without its lighter moments of levity too. Rolo especially is a pretty funny character between his bad puns and how quickly he assigns blame to aliens or zombies or both whenever something abnormal is afoot.
Of all the games on this little 2022 GOTY checklist I'd assembled, I had the least amount of expectations for Beacon Pines (in truth, I'd never heard of it prior to some research into what was available on Game Pass) but it's proven to be something of a surprising dark horse. That's not to say it couldn't have been better: the charm system could've allowed for so many more joke or fake endings, rather than the scant two or three options offered by most branches, and the extreme linearity is felt most keenly during the times when you hit a dead end and there's only one other path open to you; it's very rare when you have multiple avenues to explore for hints or other early conclusions, which causes the illusion of having all these routes open to you to waver a smidge. The game shies away from the complex narrative web-spinning visual novels are capable of, but as it doesn't really have anything to replace it in terms of other available adventure game mechanics it all ends up coming off as a little too rudimentary and straightforward despite its relatively uncommon (outside of Japan, at least) gimmick. Even so, the writing and the visuals do plenty to make the game feel every bit the polished, professional product and the tale's got a decent length to it at around six to seven hours that goes in some very unexpected directions, so if you have Game Pass active I might suggest giving it a look as it's evidently flown under a lot of radars.
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