BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION

Every few years an adventure game arrives that makes the rest of the genre look parochial. BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION is that kind of game — a South African studio’s answer to a genre that has spent thirty years recycling haunted mansions, pirate islands and rain-slicked cyberpunk alleys. THE BROTHERHOOD, the two-brother outfit behind the isometric sci-fi horror of STASIS and its short, nasty prequel CAYNE, took the same engine philosophy and pointed it somewhere nobody else was looking: a far-future Africa remade by an alien monolith called the Penrose.

The setup is deliberately pulpy. Mark, a man yanked out of the 1980s, wakes up decades downstream from the world he knew, hunting for his brother Don. That’s a well-worn hook, and the studio knows it. The hook exists to give you a reason to walk through the actual subject of the game: a continent where the monolith’s fallout has produced techno-shamans, warring factions, sentient machines and ecosystems that read as neither utopian nor apocalyptic. It is genuinely alien in a way that most “alien” games aren’t, because its reference points aren’t Blade Runner and Alien — they’re regional, specific, and rendered by people who live there.

The market position is honest about itself. This is a mid-budget, premium, single-purchase adventure game in a category dominated by nostalgia projects and Kickstarter revivals. It shipped on Windows, Linux, macOS, Switch and PS4 — no iOS or Android release, despite a control scheme that would seem to invite one. The reception split along platform lines: a 76 on Metacritic, warmer on desktop, distinctly cooler on console. That split isn’t a rounding error. It’s the whole story.

• An original setting: Afro-futurist science fiction built around the Penrose monolith, with sprawling hand-painted isometric regions you traverse on foot and by aircraft — a world map with real geography rather than a hub-and-spoke menu.
• A fully voiced African cast: Thousands of branching lines across 40+ unique characters, all performed by African voice actors. The accents, cadences and idioms are the setting, not decoration on top of it.
• A Mick Gordon score against type: The composer of DOOM and Wolfenstein trades industrial aggression for something atmospheric and percussive.
• Choice-mediated faction conflict: Dialogue decisions arbitrate between rival groups, with consequences that ripple into how regions and characters treat the player.
• Survival encounters and optional lore: Nanite swarms, giant scorpions and rocket-armed robots punctuate the puzzling, with side content scattered for players who actually read the datapads.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip away the art and you have a 1998 adventure game with a 2020 interface. Walk, look, take, combine, talk. THE BROTHERHOOD modernized the presentation of that loop — context-sensitive cursors, a clean radial-ish inventory, no verb list to memorize — without modernizing the design underneath it. That’s a defensible choice. It’s also the source of nearly every complaint the game has earned.

The core problem is legibility of intent. In a well-designed adventure puzzle, the goal should be articulable before the solution is known: get past that guard. Here, the objective is frequently unclear — which region holds the object that satisfies it, or whether the thing being carried is a puzzle item or set dressing. The game hands out a large, beautiful, non-linear map early, then asks players to solve gates whose prerequisites live three regions away with no in-fiction signal that they exist. That’s not difficulty. That’s search-space inflation — an artificial extension of playtime by widening the haystack rather than sharpening the needle.

The backtracking follows directly from that. Because the aircraft makes travel trivially available, the designers used it as a license to distribute puzzle dependencies across the entire map. The result is a mid-game that sags badly: long stretches where the player isn’t thinking, they’re auditing — re-flying to every location, re-clicking every hotspot, checking whether the thing just acquired unlocks anything anywhere. Multiple regions, dozens of screens, a linear scan. The failure state isn’t frustration at a clever puzzle; it’s boredom in a gorgeous place, which is a much worse thing to do to a player.

Pixel-hunting compounds it. The art is dense — that’s the point, and it’s the game’s greatest asset — but density is hostile to hotspot discovery. A rusted valve painted with the same loving detail as fifty other rusted objects on the same screen is invisible. Adventure games solved this problem a decade ago with a hotspot-highlight key. Its absence here is the single most consequential omission in the design.

Dialogue and Choice

The conversation system is where the game earns its reputation. Branching trees run deep, characters have opinions that persist, and the writing trusts the player to keep up with names, factions and history without a glossary holding a hand. The faction arbitration is real — not a binary morality slider but a series of positions taken, some of which close doors permanently.

The performances carry it. Casting African actors wasn’t a diversity checkbox; it’s a craft decision with mechanical consequences, because factions and regions become identifiable by voice before the UI says anything. A world this unfamiliar needs anchors, and the vocal performances do work that the interface doesn’t.

Where it strains is volume against pacing. Thousands of lines is a lot of lines, and not all of them are load-bearing. Characters who should deliver two sharp exchanges deliver seven, and in a game already fighting a mid-game drag, generous dialogue becomes another thing between the player and forward motion. The optional lore is where the excess belongs, and much of it is excellent. Some of it leaked into the critical path.

Combat and Encounters

Be clear about expectations: the nanite swarms, scorpions and rocket-armed robots are puzzles wearing threat costumes, not systems. They’re set pieces that vary the rhythm and occasionally raise the stakes of failure. As tension management, they mostly work. As mechanics, they’re thin, and anyone arriving expecting survival gameplay will find a handful of scripted problems with correct answers.

The pre-rendered 2D isometric work is the reason to play this. It’s not “good for an indie” — it’s the strongest art direction in the genre since the Sanitarium era, and it’s doing something harder than photorealism: inventing an aesthetic vocabulary from scratch. Ruined infrastructure fused with organic growth, machinery that reads as ritual object, colour palettes that shift meaningfully between regions. Every screen is composed like a painting because it is one.

The interface is restrained and mostly correct — minimal chrome, readable inventory, sensible context actions. It gets out of the way. The one place it fails is the hotspot problem above, where restraint becomes withholding.

By design, this is a light game on hardware. Pre-rendered backgrounds mean modest requirements on desktop; the engine’s demands are memory and storage, not GPU. Hold that thought.

Steam is the definitive version, and it isn’t close. Mouse input is what this design was built for: precise hotspot acquisition, fast inventory manipulation, quick map traversal. At high resolution on a large display, the art reads the way it was painted, and small UI text stays legible. If a PC is available and there’s a choice to make, choose this one.

The Nintendo Switch version is a real compromise, and the cooler console reception is earned by the port rather than the game. Two problems, both structural. First, storage and streaming — a game built on large pre-rendered assets asks a lot of Switch hardware, and the map-hopping the design depends on becomes a tax. A design that already asks players to backtrack across regions punishes each trip with a wait, which converts a pacing weakness into a pacing failure. Second, cursor emulation. THE BROTHERHOOD reworked the controls, UI and movement for gamepads, and the effort is visible, but analog-stick pointing across dense, detail-heavy screens is fundamentally worse at pixel-hunting than a mouse. Undocked, the small screen makes the fine detail and text harder to parse, exactly where the game needs clarity most.

Buy the Switch version only if it’s the only option and the friction is acceptable. Portability doesn’t compensate for a design this dependent on precision.

BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION is a frustrating kind of good. THE BROTHERHOOD did the hard part — they invented a place, populated it with people who sound like they belong there, scored it properly, and painted every square inch of it by hand. Studios ten times their size fail at that constantly. Then they attached it to puzzle design that treats the player’s time as an infinite resource, and shipped a console port that turns the design’s weakest structural assumption into its defining experience.

The 76 on Metacritic is about right, and the platform split is the market telling the truth. What survives the criticism is the thing that matters longest: years from now, nobody will remember the valve that couldn’t be found on screen 40. They’ll remember the Penrose, the voices, and the sight of a map no other game has ever shown. For most players, that isn’t enough to carry the grind around it — but for patient adventure veterans on PC, it comes close.