#BENEATH A STEEL SKY TRAPPED FULL#

My full graphml file for BenASS can be downloaded here if you want to play with it. There’s also a browser version, yED Live, for creating and viewing the graphml files. I create my PDCs using the free yEd Graph Editor. This tells you what order you need to solve the puzzles, or if there are many parallel routes through the game. PDCs show all the locks and keys as blocks and lines between them show how they depend on one another.

But good games have many conceptually varied locks and keys such as guards or goats you need to distract, information you need to obtain in conversations, or logic puzzles to solve. A lock might literally be a lock on a door that requires a key to open. I’ve been refining the way I create Puzzle Dependency Charts since I first wrote about them in June 2019, using LucasArts’ The Dig as an example and then the flawed but fun Detective Di.īriefly, a puzzle game can be thought of as a series of locks that bar progress and keys which open the locks. Is Beneath a Steel Sky really the classic it’s held up to be? I’ll be analysing its structure using four Puzzle Dependency Charts that map out the whole game. In the meantime, I went back to BenASS to see how it compares. I’ll wait for a few more patches come out. And though it has now been patched enough that I could play it beginning to end, it’s not yet sufficiently fixed to warrant playing a second time or do a full analysis. This was supposed to be an analysis of Beyond a Steel Sky, Revolution Software’s newly released sequel to their 1990s cyberpunk thriller Beneath a Steel Sky.

Beneath a steel sky trapped