Beyond Good And Evil
I specified in the introduction to this series that I am playing every game in my Steam library, which comes with the implication that I am playing the Steam version of these games. Ordinarily, this doesn’t matter much, but here, it very much matters.
The Steam version of Beyond Good & Evil is a buggy mess, and part of my enjoyment of this game was impacted by that. It’s also sometimes difficult for me to tell where something is a bug and where it’s a feature. My version was also exclusively in French with subtitles only working on my second session with it. In short, my experience with the game and my thoughts on it are very much coloured by some significant technical difficulties.
That said, I still played six hours of it. That, coupled with what I’ve already said about bugs and language, still stands as a testament to this game and how much I got out of it. It’s a testament to this game’s success that, while buggy, I still played it for longer than a lot of the games I play in this series.
This is the same face I made when I realised there were no subtitles and I was committing to an all-French playthrough.
Beyond Good & Evil is an action-adventure game where you play as Jade, a plucky freedom fighter rescuing her planet from alien invaders called DomZ. Alongside her friend, Pey’j, she uncovers webs of conspiracy, human trafficking, and wildlife photography.
Beyond Good & Evil has a few different gameplay elements, from stealth areas to racing areas to light platforming. Its mechanics are fairly straightforward and easy to manage. Outside the bugs, it’s easy to play, which, for someone terrible at platformers, is always refreshing.
Truly, I am a master of games.
Beyond Good & Evil also has a really beautiful and unique world. Some of it is evident in the screenshots I’ve posted, but the world is reminiscent of something right out of old Doctor Who episodes or a fever dream mixed with Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. The characters are interesting, the writing is snappy (or at least, what I could tell of it), and the world is legitimately one I love exploring. It’s a great environment, and it’s that environment that by and large propelled me through the game.
That, and people’s strange willingness to be photographed.
Why, then, did I not finish the game? Part of it is, as I said, that the Steam version is buggy. When you have a game with frequent saves, that’s navigable, but Beyond Good & Evil is an older game, with save points sometimes being few and far between. When a bug strikes, it can wipe out progress. This doesn’t seem like the original game’s fault - it is, after all, a port into Steam - but when faced with the prospect of crawling through the same stealth puzzle again, or bashing the same enemies with a stick again, it can start to seem a bit tedious.
Ultimately, the force of the world and the half-understood story weren’t enough to keep me going. The prospect of grinding more pearls to continue going or to grind out the same race five or six times became a little too much for me to be willing to continue. Maybe this would have gone better with a less buggy version, or maybe the game’s mechanics and structure betray its age a bit too much. I had a great time, and maybe at some point I will finish the game.
But for now, I’ll leave it with the knowledge that I had a great time.
Developer: Ubisoft
Genre: Action-Adventure
Year: 2003
Country: France/Italy
Language: French
Play Time: 12 Hours