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A full-on retro point and click adventure | Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard - Review

2K View2022-12-26

Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard is an old-school point and click adventure game reminiscent of the classic animated movies of the 90s as well as classic video games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam and Max, and Kings Quest.

🟩Pros

+A lighthearted story

+Faithful to 90s point and click aesthetics

+Modern game mode to make it more accessible

🟥Cons

-too difficult and can be frustrating

-price is a bit steep for what it offers

An exciting peek into the glory days of point and click adventure games, and for better or worse, without holding back anything in terms of puzzle solving gameplay, pixel art, and playful storytelling. Well, except for the “Modern” game mode where items are more visible and puzzles are easier in general compared to “Classic” mode.

Welcome to Velehill

Set in the small kingdom of Velehill where our character, a young roebuck deer named Fine, finds himself in the middle of a mysterious series of occurrences. Missing animals, destroyed houses, and dark shadows roaming through the forests. Very early on you are given motivation to find these missing animals, piquing up your curiosity just enough to drive you forward in the game.

Despite the ominous circumstances, the story of Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard is actually lighthearted. Even in faces of danger and horror, Fine is unmoved and still makes witty and funny remarks, he is literally fine.

Most of the bulk of the narrative are centered in the cartoonish — at times comedic — interactions between various anthropomorphic animals. Owls, deers, sheeps, birds, and many more; all kinds of creatures are present.

Impressive voice acting and artstyle

The voice acting is impressive and would pass as a real cartoon voice acting, Fine frequently makes funny remarks on the world around him and with other characters. He also helps the player in solving puzzles with funny and playful lines for every item, object, and point of interest that you can interact with.

The dialogue is very charmingly written, with occasional choices given to the player. If you pay enough attention to the voices though, it’s quite obvious that the voice actors are being reused, which is understandable for an indie game.

All the artwork in the game is hand-drawn, including the cinematic cutscenes. It really nails the look of all the 90s point and click adventure games. The pixelated art style, choppy animations, the nine action buttons alongside the inventory slots, even the unusually (in today’s standards) bold large text for the prompts and subtitles are present.

This retro vibe is continued all the way up to the soundtrack, with atmospheric midi quality background music that will take fans back in time to Lucasarts and Sierra days. They really captured the feeling not only in the music depart but in the gameplay sounds too where the silly cartoonish animations are paired with a matching goofy sound bite.

Gameplay Analysis

In Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard, investigative exploration and going through every nook and cranny is highly encouraged and emphasized. In addition to the overarching world map where you can choose to travel in different locations, you are often given multiple paths to go to within those locations (mainly the four cardinal directions) and you can interact with the environment many different ways using many different objects you come across in the world.

You can interact with the environment and the objects in multiple ways, and it's pretty obvious with the nine available buttons ever present, taking up a third of the screen space. You can open and close items, push or pull, use or give, pick up or look at items, or talk to characters. What’s not obvious are some of the solutions and key items to the puzzles.

The puzzle difficulty of the 90s games have been mostly retained. On many occasions, the game uses cheap visual tricks to obscure an otherwise obvious solution, exacerbated by the limiting retro pixel art and puzzle oriented gameplay, it can be annoying and frustrating at times.

This frustrating aspect is where Modern game mode comes in if you want a more automated experience and just want to focus on its narrative and charm. Outside the puzzle solving mechanic, you can also fail if you choose the wrong dialogue choices. Thankfully, you can easily restore your saves to an earlier point.

Personally I prefer Modern mode as most of the game's appeal comes from its story and charm, and the puzzle solving mechanics of the 90s are honestly outdated for my tastes, Modern mode gives it a much needed modernization that actually respects the player’s time and provides a much better pacing to the story.

The overall experience should take you under 8 hours to complete, which for me is a bit too long considering the game is simplistic in its mechanics and there’s not much to do besides point and click exploration and puzzle solving. There is no combat, nor roleplaying aspects to spice things up, making the gameplay a bit repetitive a few hours in.

Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard faithfully feels like a game from the 90s and If you are someone who loves these kinds of point and click adventure games and wants a gameplay experience like that again with a fresh new story, this game is worth a try, if you can get past the steep price point.

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