This review contains spoilers
The Pale Beyond is a good game, but not a great one. It has a solid narrative, excellent artwork, and well realized characters. The game suffers from incongruity between its narrative and the mechanics of the game, on both a small and a large level. Overall I found it to be worthwhile experience - an experience that didn't overstay its welcome.
During Act 2 Grimley plays an insulting song about you, and a large part of the crew joins in. Grimley has been the staunchest detractor of your captaincy. One of the options to deal with this is to smash his accordion. At first the game gives this action the weight it deserves: several members of your crew are demoralized, your status in the eyes of several important people in the crew goes down, and Grimley's loyalty tanks to a near unrecoverable low. However immediately after this event, you can speak to Grimley normally, and he'll act like nothing is wrong. The game offers you opportunities to speak to important characters at the end of each week, and depending on your dialogue responses you can gain or lose loyalty. Grimley's weekly dialogue is entirely unaffected by you smashing his accordion- no anger is present at all. You can even gain loyalty from him in this conversation. This conversation is entirely the same no matter how you resolve the incident. This is the mismatch between the narrative and the game's mechanics at a smaller level. You make decisions that should be quite impactful, but have zero effect on things that they clearly should. On a larger scale there's a mismatch between the grimness of the situation you're placed in and the actual difficulty of the survival management. In short, its far too easy. I did play on normal, and I highly recommend playing on hard for a better experience, although I can't speak to how much better it'd be. But for my playthrough things were far too easy, and it did take away some weight from the narrative.
Overall though I found the narrative to be good. The character portraits do a great job of portraying their personalities and evolution over the course of the game. The cast of the characters is good, although a few can feel a bit one dimensional. I found the ending of the game to be quite satisfying, and there is room for a large amount of variation in how things play out, which I was happy with. The game is relatively short, which I thought was a good thing, because it kept things like the survival management from overstaying their welcome. Overall I enjoyed my time with the game, and I'd feel comfortable recommending it to fans of narrative-focused games. This is especially good as first release by Bellular Studios, I'll be looking forward to trying what they release next.
During Act 2 Grimley plays an insulting song about you, and a large part of the crew joins in. Grimley has been the staunchest detractor of your captaincy. One of the options to deal with this is to smash his accordion. At first the game gives this action the weight it deserves: several members of your crew are demoralized, your status in the eyes of several important people in the crew goes down, and Grimley's loyalty tanks to a near unrecoverable low. However immediately after this event, you can speak to Grimley normally, and he'll act like nothing is wrong. The game offers you opportunities to speak to important characters at the end of each week, and depending on your dialogue responses you can gain or lose loyalty. Grimley's weekly dialogue is entirely unaffected by you smashing his accordion- no anger is present at all. You can even gain loyalty from him in this conversation. This conversation is entirely the same no matter how you resolve the incident. This is the mismatch between the narrative and the game's mechanics at a smaller level. You make decisions that should be quite impactful, but have zero effect on things that they clearly should. On a larger scale there's a mismatch between the grimness of the situation you're placed in and the actual difficulty of the survival management. In short, its far too easy. I did play on normal, and I highly recommend playing on hard for a better experience, although I can't speak to how much better it'd be. But for my playthrough things were far too easy, and it did take away some weight from the narrative.
Overall though I found the narrative to be good. The character portraits do a great job of portraying their personalities and evolution over the course of the game. The cast of the characters is good, although a few can feel a bit one dimensional. I found the ending of the game to be quite satisfying, and there is room for a large amount of variation in how things play out, which I was happy with. The game is relatively short, which I thought was a good thing, because it kept things like the survival management from overstaying their welcome. Overall I enjoyed my time with the game, and I'd feel comfortable recommending it to fans of narrative-focused games. This is especially good as first release by Bellular Studios, I'll be looking forward to trying what they release next.