This is my first game review on Hive and oh boy is it a special one. Beautiful Desolation is not your typical game, this is a point and click adventure game with heavy elements of postapocalypse that went many centuries into the future. For an indie developer team of only few people this game went above and beyond from some gaming companies with hundreds of developers. Art style, story, immersion and complete bonkersness of some of the creations in this game will leave you in awe. This world can be compared in terms of weird factor easily with the greats like Planescape Torment, Sanitarium, Torment Tides of Numenera and similar titles.
You play as a South African citizen who was just driving with his wife in their beetle when suddenly an alien object appears from the sky and creates some sort of vortex crashing their car, your wife dies in the accident and you are left horribly injured. 10 years later everything changes, the object in the sky changed everything, it introduced new technology that advanced human civilization many years into the future.
Your character however never healed mentally from the accident and decided to explore the flying object indepth with his brother to find out it's secrets, basically he went on a suicide mission. This is when the game starts, as you start to explore the object you were expelled by some kind of force far into the future. You are now stranded centuries into the future and with no ways of turning back you start to explore your new surroundings.
The title of the game describes perfectly what you will find when exploring this game, mutated people, machines fused with people, animal-human symbiosis with mutations, portals, creatures that live for centuries and one mutated train, Beautiful Desolation. Yes, this game is like a roller coaster ride on mushrooms. You will have no clue what is going on, how to save yourself, where to go and what to do, luckily this game will take you on a journey worth taking.
In terms of game mechanics you have an inventory where you can combine the items you found in the wild, you can give those items to NPCs in order to progress further. Most of the time you will have no clue where to go and what to do so there will be a lot of backtracking and talking to the same NPCs when you find out something new.
If you find the story and these images interesting, I see no reason why you shouldn't try this game out. This is easily my favorite new game after last year's Disco Elysium.
