I love student games. As I said in my Cat and the Coup review, student games present an opportunity to build something unique, that expresses an idea or a thought that wouldn’t fit a longer game, but fits perfectly well in half an hour. There’s an opportunity there for a different kind of creativity, and I enjoy seeing how that manifests.

Or we could do bullet hell. That’s good too, I guess.

Beyond is a bullet-hell action game developed by a group of students from the DigiPen Institute of Technology. You play as a Opal, a girl trying to bring her family’s souls to rest by fighting her way through a dungeon. She fights gems, gravity, and clunky controls, but ultimately succeeds in laying her father to rest.

To make her way through the dungeon, Opal has a variety of weapons. Combat is a fairly standard pointing and shooting, combined with a happy little dodge roll that I, more often than not, used to careen myself off a cliff. The mechanics are not unique, nor do they have any need to be.

This is the scariest enemy in the game.

I’m not generally a fan of bullet hell games, as I emphasised at length in my Blazing Beaks review. I play exclusively on touchpad, and shooting while making rapid movements is a bit of a tricky proposition. Beyond the mechanics, though, I also find the lack of progression and the lack of any sense of gain at a loss to be frustrating. Again, not to reiterate my points from my Blazing Beak review, but when the only reward for trying is knowing you need to do the exact same thing again, with no real reward but having to do it again in the next room, the incentive to try and fail vanishes. Nothing is gained from failure, except frustration and the knowledge that you need to do better next time.

This isn’t necessarily the issue with Beyond. Beyond’s enemies aren’t ruthlessly difficult. They’re satisfying and sufficiently challenging, but not awful. The things I dislike about bullet hells are still there, but they were always going to be there. They are features of the genre and inescapable. No, what bothers me about Beyond isn’t the things it gets right, but which don’t appeal to me personally - it’s the elements that go terribly wrong.

I made the well glow!

I struggled with the controls throughout my playthrough, both in the sense that I knew I would because of the aforementioned touchpad, but also unintentionally. I lost more health to failing to jump gaps than I did to enemies, and I stopped using my dodge roll in any room with a chasm because of the seemingly magnetic attraction the roll had to any fall. While I understand it’s a student game and going to inevitably have some issues, when those issues effect the fundamental playability of the game, they stop being forgivable. The inability to control my roll or my movement made the game frustratingly difficult.

Then it crashed and erased all my progress. I didn’t finish this game, even though it’s only half an hour long. I didn’t feel like going back through all the rooms and failing to make jumps yet again.

There’s a lot in Beyond that’s excellent. The art and world design are lovely, and the combats are well-designed. However, for all its good elements, it’s difficult to overcome the sluggish controls and the threat of progress being erased at any point. It’s a good start, but the game desperately needs to grow beyond what it currently is.

Developer: Notlink

Genre: Action

Year: 2019

Country: United States

Language: English

Play Time: 30 Minutes

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