For a novice studio this is sublime. A marriage between a visual novel and a management game that never completely sets in either genre and masterfully combines both to elevate its narrative. I’m a sucker for the ambiance The Pale Beyond is trying to reach, but I think that I’m also harder to please in this regard (I don’t like the book that would come to your mind if you were to think about this setting, for example), so, believe me when I say that this game is well written and very much well thought out. While the expedition is never pleasant and things go wrong pretty much from day one, you can definitely feel tedium, coldness and hunger mining your crew’s sanity and morale. You see them having their own interests and personalities, and you see them slowly letting them go as survival becomes not the most important thing but the only thing that matters. Some of the late game moments are haunting, not because they are super dramatic, but because they are not. There’s not enough energy for drama and confrontation when you haven’t been eating or sleeping well for three weeks in a row.

The only thing holding this game from being a true masterpiece is that, while an experience like this should be hard for what its narrative is trying to convey, I think is a bit harder than it should, prohibitively hard even. I can imagine people not finishing it despite being hooked by it, so that’s a bummer. It’s a hard line to establish, so I kinda get it.