On the one hand, Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard feels like it could have come out straight out of the mid-90s. It’s pixely presentation is crisp, the visuals are masterful, and the humour is of-the-time while being timeless, not dated. No, the 90sness of BtEoO feels like the character of an old adventure game that holds up well. On the other hand, the rather serious narrative around a cast of cartoony talking animals is something no publisher back then would have greenlit, cementing BtEoO as definitively indie.

And goodness, did the story work for me. It has the tone of a LucasArts title but the imagination of a cool indie comic. Playing it, I got lost in this world, and I had trouble putting it down. It’s got pacing issues and some characters are kinda flat but the world that unfolds in this narrative is spellbinding and rich. Also, within the first ten minutes of the game you can have a conversation with a talking porcupine about chord progressions and alternative music, which is kind of amazing.

The colour palette seems inspired by the Amiga but unlike 99% of Amiga games, BtEoO doesn’t cause me psychic damage with its visuals. No, the visuals of this game are quite beautiful. The sprites are lively and drawn in a sharp cartoony style although to nitpick: the shrinking on the sprite muddies up the pixels with some kind of compression. The machines also look a stylistically odd but maybe I’m okay with that because they’re strange creatures in the first place. The backgrounds? Painterly.

Also gonna shout out the music. That main theme with the soaring strings: masterful. In the end, I loved this game. I didn’t play it in its entirety over the last few days because I wasn’t enamoured with it. As someone who previously didn’t like point & click adventure games, this title showed me the beauty and nuance of the genre. I’ve found something really special with this one.