Developer: Graphium Studio
Publisher: Graphium Studio
Platform: PC
Beyond the Invisible: Darkness Game – Review
Point and click adventure games have a long and proud history. From the Sierra age with King’s quest for the IBM PCjr, up until today with Beyond the Invisible, existing before even PCs were the standard form factor they are today. Having had so long to develop, they have settled in a formulaic style, with a pretty standard set of gameplay mechanics. Some moon logic puzzles, barriers that feel extremely out of place, and combining items you find to make new items that you need to solve puzzles. Other games have tried an entirely different way of gameplay, keeping the core genre of point and click intact, but focusing more on different gameplay elements. Phoenix Wright is a series famous for not adhering to the combination of items, but more on the interrogation and meaning of items in a story. Does Beyond the Invisible adhere to these standards or does it invent? Lets find out!
Story
Driving at night down a misty back road in a dead part of the country, your police scanner goes off, calling for help on mysterious circumstances in a nearby town. Before you get to the town however, you crash your car and have to go by foot. Arriving at your destination you find a pervasive fog, and a town that is deserted with the exception of a few people. With wolves taking over the empty streets, you come across a woman who runs from the pair that followed her and she gets knocked out. Before you can catch your breath from saving her though, she gets abducted by the ghosts that seem to be haunting the town. Carrying on your investigation you’ll find an elf in the city’s jail, and the story just devolves from there.
Point and click games are heavily reliant on story for its enjoyment as there is no real opportunity for any high-action gameplay elements or in-depth mechanics that require you to think about the repercussions of your actions in the context of the gameplay. Usually the story falls in pretty standard archetypes, and so does this game. As explained earlier, the storyline is one of the seemingly normal call that escalates into something big. The story past the spoiler barrier is much of the same too, an archetypal story of a stranger that brings you to a magical land where anything can happen. On top of those problems the story also feels rushed like one of those supermarket romance novels. The story barely taking any time to give background on its characters, and the characters not even having that much time in the game anyway. The elf you rescue dumps a bunch of exposure on you and then gets abducted quite soon after, being one of the main examples of this.
Graphics
Beyond the Invisible is graphically reasonably inspired by lovecraftian stories. There’s a lot of dark tones, ancient statues and dark parks with thick foliage trees. As stated before, (partially) being a hidden object game, a lot of emphasis is on the hidden object puzzles, of which there are only two in the game. They split it up quite cleverly by using spiderwebs and a glass covers to divide the two areas into fours, but it feels a little meager. The game does feature a good number of pseudo-animated cutscenes, with the backdrop staying still, and some minor distorting in characters when their cloaks and hair move.
Sound
All of the spoken dialogue by the characters is also voiced by actors. The quality of the voices is of a good quality, with obvious attention to detail in the quality of the audio. The people portraying the characters however clear, they sound bland, not really reacting to what is happening to the corresponding characters and feeling emotionless. This is not helped by the fact that some of the dialogues you have internally or with the characters is also extremely cheesy. The game generally uses atmospheric sound to underscore your experience, so a lot of the sounds will be related to what you’re seeing on screen, such as arcing electric jolts and the growling of wolves. Pervasive throughout your time with the game is also a nice mysterious soundtrack with some soft violins and other mystical string instruments.
Gameplay
A point and click adventure with hidden object moments, Beyond the Invisible relies a lot on its story to bring the gameplay. Arbitrary puzzles come with the genre as the game needs to throw some gameplay in between you and the goal, so literally everything on your path goes wrong. Fighting off the wolves you set the path ahead on fire, shutting off a fan that can kill you will break a powered display cabinet disabling you from touching it without gloves, you get the idea. If that is the kind of gameplay your game relies on for its content, and there is so very little of it there isn’t a lot you can say about it. It took us little over two hours to play through completely, on the medium difficulty setting, which you pick at the start of the game and is locked in for your entire playthrough. The main difference is in the amount of time your hint function restores for use. Otherwise there’s not a lot to discuss in terms of gameplay; there is no -real- moon logic, but the illogical solutions to the puzzles do come with the territory.
Conclusion
Earlier in the review we made a comparison to light novels that require little thinking to read through, and that is what Beyond the Invisible is too, there’s not a lot of substance. Especially if this is a genre of game you play a lot, you will quickly realize solutions to puzzles and you become adept at finding locations to hidden items in puzzles. That does not mean there is nothing interesting in this game however, it is still an enjoyable experience for the time you spend with it. The environments are still pretty to look at, and there will always be the sense of accomplishment when you finish a puzzle that you’ve been staring at for some time. If you’re looking to get into the genre this may be a good title to begin, otherwise it’ll be safe to skip this game.
Beyond the Invisible: Darkness Game - Review,
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