Revolution Software waited 26 years to return to Union City. The studio’s sequel to 1994’s Beneath a Steel Sky arrived in 2020, with Charles Cecil again directing and Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons handling art direction, and it lands as a cyberpunk thriller that trusts puzzles to carry its story.
Trailer, via Microids.
Robert Foster Returns to the Gap
You play Robert Foster, ten years after the first game. He has spent that decade as a wandering nomad in the Gap, helping local tribal groups. While fishing with his friend Max and Max’s son Milo, androids attack and take Milo prisoner aboard a machine Foster calls a Stalker. Foster vows to bring the child home and follows the Stalker — straight back to Union City.
Getting inside means assuming a dead man’s identity. Foster sneaks in on the ID chip of a man named Graham, with help from a delivery driver named Wendell. What he finds is a city transformed.
Joey Became a Saviour, Then Vanished
Union City now looks like a paradise. Citizens live happily under the surveillance and control of a benign AI, and Joey — Foster’s old companion — was dubbed the city’s saviour before apparently disappearing. A council of five humans runs the citizens’ welfare in his place.
Foster finds Joey’s old circuit board with his original personality intact and installs it in a robot vacuum cleaner. The result is little Joey, who takes the demotion badly. That running joke sits alongside the game’s darker turns, and the tonal swing is where Beyond a Steel Sky does its best work.
A Council of Five and a Brainwashing Plot
An officer named Orana tells Foster she and Graham were investigating the Stalkers before Graham died, and they had tracked the machines inside the city. Foster befriends her after Danielle Piermont vouches for him. When they find the Stalkers’ hideout, Foster is captured and nearly brainwashed; Orana and little Joey pull him out in time.
They discover the kidnapped children are being brainwashed too, and they devise a plan to rescue the children and sneak them out of the city. The plan works. Little Joey dies saving them. Foster and Orana then confront the council — and that is where the source material stops, so we will too.
A child has been abducted in a brutal attack. You have vowed to bring him home.
What the Puzzle Design Gets Right
The game runs on Unreal Engine 4 with cel-shaded 3D graphics and comic book-styled text boxes, a choice that keeps Gibbons’ art direction legible rather than decorative. Puzzles drive the narrative here, and the gameworld responds to — and is subverted by — the player’s actions. That is the pitch, and it holds up better than the genre usually manages. The adventure is single player, third person, and built around solving rather than shooting.
The humor is the part worth defending. A legendary hero’s consciousness stuffed into a vacuum cleaner is a gag that could have curdled, and it does not, because the game plays Joey’s outrage straight. The thriller beats around the Stalkers and the brainwashed children land harder for it.
Where Beyond a Steel Sky Falls Short
The sequel’s biggest problem is that its best ideas arrive late. The first act spends its time on Foster’s return and the identity theft, and the Union City reveal — a utopia that is not what it appears to be — is the oldest move in the cyberpunk book. The council of five is an intriguing villain by committee, but the game leans on Joey’s absence as a mystery for longer than the payoff rewards.
The cel-shaded look and comic text boxes are a smart match for Gibbons’ involvement, yet the game’s scale sometimes reads smaller than its premise. A story about the last mega-cities in a world ravaged by shattering wars and political meltdown spends most of its time in corridors and hiding spots.
None of this sinks it. Beyond a Steel Sky is a real sequel rather than a nostalgia exercise, and it shipped on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac, Linux, and iOS.
It also arrived in two waves: June 26, 2020 on Apple Arcade for iOS and tvOS, then July 16, 2020 on Steam for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the console versions following on November 30, 2021 under publisher Microids. Soft Source is also credited as a publisher. The critical aggregate sits at 7.6/10 across five outlets, and that feels right — a game with a sharp central hook, a genuinely funny companion, and a middle stretch that asks you to wait for the good part.
Worth playing for the Joey material alone. Just know the road there is longer than it needs to be.
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