The Pale Beyond review: compelling but messy arctic survival RPG

On my maiden voyage to the middle of frozen nowhere, I’ve made a new best friend: the hoosh pot. It’s survival cooking — hoosh is a sort of Antarctic explorer’s gruel made with whatever’s lying around, from penguins to dead sled dogs, and under dire circumstances, the unsavory products of “the custom of the sea.” As someone with a morbid fascination with weird historical food, it’s easy for me to obsess over the hoosh, but as a stalwart upholder of civilization, I refuse to succumb to cannibalism.

I’m not doing an intense gastronomical LARP — I’m playing Beyond the Pale, a survival-driven adventure that takes a page from tales of late-19th-century polar explorers, and perhaps more recently, the first season of AMC’s historical thriller The TerrorIt was also based on a lost expedition. At first blush, it’s a straightforward survival simulator where I expect the worst to happen, because there’s nothing positive that can come from forcibly inserting a bunch of soft, vulnerable mammals into an icebound hellscape that simply does not wish to host them. What are we to do with humans when we lack hubris?

My story starts with Captain Hunt meeting me, a mysterious old salt, who employs Robin Shaw as my first mate on the Temperance. The job is to find the Temperance’s missing sister ship, the Viscount. It’s clear that Hunt is keeping secrets, and once we’re aboard, it becomes even clearer that the captain — while loved and respected by the crew — is totally checked out. Templeton is a rigid biologist, who looks like a steely-eyed, draugr. He seems to be the sole one interested in the finding of the twin ships. When Hunt goes missing, Shaw must take up the captain’s mantle, at least temporarily, to see things through.

Image: Bellular Studios/Fellowtraveller

Time passes in weekly increments, in which Shaw is responsible for maintaining food, fuel, and, arguably, the ship’s most important resource: decorum, or morale. Explore the ship to find resource cards and items that improve or alter decorum. Shaw may assign crew members to dig coal and scientists to produce medicine. The main duty is “taking requests” as the captain, which may involve settling disputes or taking sides and inevitably causing problems. If a specialist — the only person in the crew who can perform a specific job — gets too sick, it can spell death for the mission. This is the maritime HR system that forms the rigid backbone. Beyond the Pale’s resource management, and affects each person’s loyalty to Shaw. The ultimate goal of survival is harmony between 22 people, who can be clumsy, irritating, awkward or rude.

The claustrophobic polar setting is a quick and effective way to push Shaw uncomfortably into each character’s minuscule radius of personal space. The concept of privacy becomes more distant than warm and dry land as the misery continues. There’s a grim sense of inevitability as Shaw leads the crew closer to the Viscount’s last known position — an endeavor hampered by constant failure and tough decisions. Its branching paths in a locked tree network are not a problem, however. Beyond the Pale remains an overwhelmingly linear experience — one undermined by a distinct lack of polish and small UX choices that snowball into genuine frustration after repeated mission deaths and failures.

For instance, the “locked” save/load tree system means that if you die (i.e., you run out of decorum and the expedition ends), there are only a handful of points on the tree you can return to before reliving a parade of tedious UI notifications and prompts for 20-plus individual characters until you die again. Mid-game, I became inured to the soft little chimes alerting me to each individual crew member’s frostbite or demoralization — several times, I impatiently sat through an unskippable sequence of death notifications, one by one. In spite of how deeply invested I may have been in the health and well-being my anxious doctor, or an especially abrasive engineering engineer, it came to a point when every gentle little notification was sufficient. Ping The crampon became the crown of my head. It didn’t help that the game is absolutely drowning in typos, which is incredibly distracting for a dialogue-heavy, text-focused genre that lives and dies by the power of prose.

Image: Bellular Studios/Fellowtraveller

While you can travel around the ship, you cannot talk to anyone. You will not be able to move forward unless you click on certain yellow-bordered icons. However, at some points in the narrative, if you don’t choose to “take requests” to begin the week, it breaks the game, and you have to start from the last save point.

At Week 17, for instance, I died several times, which in itself is no big deal — I die a lot in games! But Beyond the Pale My fate was sealed when I kept being sent back to the start of each week with only 0-5 decorum. Every time this happened, I had to go back to Groundhog Day or Week 1 again, sit through the entire list of individual deaths and illnesses, then scroll down the save tree until I reached Week 4. As a result, every restart — and there were many — felt more like death by a thousand cuts. This shouldn’t be the case in a game that wants you to branch out and experiment with new captaining decisions to unlock new outcomes; at times I tried a more forceful, domineering version of Shaw, which had mixed results among the crew.

After choosing the majority of my options again, I was surprised to see that I had added a branch to the narrative tree. What I did different is not clear. For my own safety, I settled for the most straightforward completion strategy. Shaw was to make themselves as popular as possible with the crew, except Templeton whose Night King-meets – British Navy officer vibes were very rancid. While this was very helpful for one end, it made Shaw look like a selfish liar in the other. I had, after all, led most of my crew to survival through unthinkable circumstances, and I wasn’t about to let all that hard-won moral righteousness go to waste.

Image: Bellular Studios/Fellowtraveller

The biggest disappointment of the entire game was its final reveal. This revealed that the game tries to smash the fourth wall in the very last second. It simply didn’t click with me. Thus far, the game had taken a fairly understated approach to the main story beats, bolstering the game’s immersive mystery, which, coupled with constant challenges within and without the Temperance camp, built up an effective sense of paranoid momentum; up until the moment when Shaw enters the captain’s cabin on the Viscount, I genuinely didn’t know what to expect.

It is to its credit that the game avoids some of the most tokenistic and fetishistic tendencies of settler polar expedition/frontier fiction that ignore strong cultural Native taboos in favor of sensational horror; a fairly recent instance was Devolver’s “immersive sim” RPG Weird WestThe sensitivity consulting firm, although they did an excellent job of showcasing Anishinaabe languages, decided to add a cultural taboo.

Image: Bellular Studios/Fellowtraveller

The Terror writers tried to avoid this by creating their own myth based on Inuit culture — essentially, an exercise in renaming and repackaging the unspeakable into a comfortable form of plausible deniability. In theory, this feels like a workable compromise, but in practice, the road to artistic freedom is more often than not paved with things that simply aren’t meant for cheap entertainment. The same path can be taken in one direction. Beyond the Pale, but I ignored tugging that thread in favor of concentrating on my crew’s survival. It seems that the game is following. The Terror’s lead in creating its own mythology from the perspective of tired, starving, superstitious sailors who believe they’re seeing things out in the ice.

Beyond the PaleFor all of its faults and frustrations, it still manages to maintain a sort of desolate charm with rough edges. It isn’t afraid to put Shaw in horrendously painful situations where there’s no good outcome — there’s one exceptionally bleak scenario where you can practically feel the game gleefully milking what’s left of your serotonin. It’s like being able to move between worlds when you come off the ice, and make it land. It is truly breathtaking to see the ocean scene with its icebergs, which are awash with pinks and oranges, along as the storms that rage in the darkness. The plot could be more coherent and less jumbled. I think I’d love to go back to Temperance again. As it stands, I’m still choosing the ending where I get to head home and eat a civilized meal.

Beyond the Pale The game will be available on Mac and Windows PC on February 24, 2019. Fellow Traveller provided a code for a prerelease download. The PC review was conducted on the game. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Here are some links to help you find. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.