Chinese Singaporean immigrant in the UK. Writer. Nintendo enthusiast. SF Giants fan. Ailuromaniac. (Other animals are ๐Ÿ’–.) Bibliophile. Anime-niac. See the link for my TTRPGs out on http://itch.io


I backed this game on Kickstarter. It feels like that was a long time ago - certainly before Kickstarter (unwisely) decided to pivot towards blockchain. At any rate, I've been waiting for Beacon Pines for a while, but it came out when I was still snowed under with a massive queue of cosy games from September. So I decided to save it for Halloween weekend because as you can see, the story goes to some slightly spooky places.

Your character starts the game with a central mystery: his mother has gone missing. As you play further, more mysteries are revealed: what's going on with the spooky abandonned fertiliser factory on the edge of town? How does that relate to the history of Beacon Pines? Who are the wealthy Valentine family and what do they have to do with the calamity the town experienced a while ago?

Gameplay itself is a mixture of running around, talking to different characters, interacting with things, collecting words that you can then deploy to move the story along. Examples of some words you can discover: "Pull", "Shame", "Hide", "Shit", "Fight", "Mallce", "Junk", etc. There's a storybook format to the game - and this is where the narrator comes in, reading what's going on and encouraging you to find different ways forward when you hit a dead end in the tale. This will happen quite a few times, as the story branches in various directions depending on the words you choose to deploy at key moments.

You won't have to play through the story over and over again once you reach the end of a branch, because you can simply go back to each choice point and use a different word.

In a way, it's a glorified visual novel with different endings, and you will play through most of those before you get to the final happy ending and the credits. It's no chore to keep playing, not just because it's easy to choose a different branch to go down, but also because the character design is good: the character art is full of detail and personality, the story has little moments of humour, and so on. Something I really appreciated: there are little things you can just interact with in your environment. You can play a little fishing game that in no way changes any outcome, but feels a bit emotional because it's a memory of fishing with your late father when you were a child. You use different words as bait and can catch different things from the pond with those.

There are also fun little moments. A giant watermelon is placed behind a "No Touching" sign. Can you touch the watermelon? Yes you can. It does nothing for the story, but who wouldn't want to give it a poke? I like it when games do this: indulge the player with something non-essential that nonetheless recognises something about how you would like to play. It's like being able to pet the dog in any number of games now. Play doesn't always have to be serious, in the sense of driving the story on, or seeing the player work towards mastery, or accrueing some vital resource. Sometimes I just want to pet the dog. Or poke the giant watermelon. ๐Ÿ˜‚ That's what sparks joy for me anyway.

Against the cute, cosy fun moments, the story presents some darker themes and events. There is jeopardy in some of the endings; you can die. Other characters can experience harm. Some unpleasant or mildly gruesome things can happen. But again, none of the "bad" endings are final. It's mostly a chill and relaxing game despite those potential outcomes. If anything, I sometimes found myself nodding off a little while playing it - not because the game is in any way boring, but because the book format of it, and the narrator - the only voiced role in the game - gave me the peaceful feeling of having a bedtime story read to me when I was a child, by my parents.

This is a relatively short game. I finished it over a couple of evenings; it took me a bit longer than the amount of spare time I had over the Halloween weekend. I think that's good though, because it didn't outstay its welcome. I wouldn't have wanted a huge number of story branches to go down, because the mystery is revealed a bit more each time you go down a different branch, and so there's an incentive to keep going till everything is made clear. After that, all that's left to do is wrap everything up in the epilogue and bid a fond goodbye to the characters and the town you've come to enjoy.


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