Beautiful Desolation

The first thing I noticed about Beautiful Desolation was its fantastic visuals, with rusty post-apocalyptic 2D isometric art, landscapes, and phenomenal character designs that become more apparent during its many cutscenes. Being a story-driven game, its look may resemble that of an action RPG that targets an adrenaline-seeking audience, but in fact it focuses more on exploration and dialogue. While it is still a role-playing adventure, it was originally a point-and-click game making this more suitable for those who are curious about the story and the characters’ outcomes. Although often chall...

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 heard good things about Beautiful Desolation, a point-and-click adventure game released earlier last year for PC. It was released shortly after I had finished playing Disco Elysium, yet another game with a similar gameplay loop and mechanics. For reasons beyond me, I just didn’t play it at the time, even though it featured an interesting afrofuturistic aesthetic, downright gorgeous visuals, and most importantly, a soundtrack composed by the man, the legend, the one and only Mick Gordo...

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 wo...

Ultimately, I can’t understate how fascinating and engaging the characters and the world they exist in are. If you have the patience to put up with some clunky game design and busywork, Beautiful Desolation is absolutely worth playing. This game is available now for $19.99 on GOG and Steam.