But in the next moment, you’ll be solving an elaborate puzzle to flip a dog into a swimming pool. True, there are some thoughtful moments in the game that touch on these issues. It feels like a missed opportunity, because dystopian fiction is often a great way to say something meaningful about our own society. But they don’t do enough with this aspect of the story, focusing mainly on Foster’s immediate predicament.
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It’s a politically charged game, informed by the era in which it was made. I can’t think of a game with more northerners in it. The jaunty music, slapstick, and silly jokes jar with the bleak setting, and for a game supposedly set in Australia, most of the people you meet have stereotypical regional English accents. Inspired by the success of LucasArts adventure games such as Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island, Revolution injected the game with a distinctly British sense of humour. In some respects it is, but mostly it has the peculiar whimsy of a sitcom from the 1970s. With such a dark premise and that evocative title, you’d be forgiven for thinking Beneath a Steel Sky was some kind of earnest, weighty science fiction story. At the beginning of the game, a jack-booted security force arrives in his village, kills his adopted family, and takes him to the city as a prisoner-and he has no idea why. A helicopter crash left him stranded in the Outback as a boy and he was raised by a group of aboriginals. Set in Australia in the wake of some unspecified apocalyptic event, it’s the story of a man named Foster trying to escape from a dystopian metropolis called Union City. Gibbons wrote a story outline, titled Underworld, which laid the groundwork for what would eventually become Beneath a Steel Sky.