Beacon Pines Review

Beacon Pines is one of those iconically gorgeous indie games that captured my attention within moments of discovering it. Initially a Kickstarter project, it had everything that a future indie success needed – a beautiful aesthetic, a passionate team and a quirky core mechanic to tell its story.

The town of Beacon Pine seems almost aggressively mundane – once known for its export of incredible fertiliser, all it took was one particularly bad harvest for that cash cow to vanish, and now the sleepy little corner of nowhere is struggling to get back on its feet while a corporate entity tries to establish itself as the future of fertiliser production. Its humanoid animal characters all react to this news with differing feelings – but at the core of it all is young Luka, ready to get into trouble over the summer as he investigates why his mother went missing.

I personally wouldn’t trust two kids at the base of my ladder

It tells a dark – almost eldritch – story carried by characters and their desires. Your interactions with the world are mostly driven by curiosity, talking to people and rummaging around with what you can touch and interact with. These same conversations and inquisitive pokes sometimes reward you with a Charm, an embodiment of an action or term that appeared in dialogue. Perhaps a character remarks on a time when they felt sad, the screen will display a ‘Weep’ charm, which will then vanish into your backpack. These are the core of your gameplay progression – as they are, well, quite literally used to progress the story.

If you are dealing with shit, why not put on a hazard suit?

Beacon Pines’ entire aesthetic is that it is a story that is not yet written, but still familiar. The comforting narrator voice that walks you through the story beats will remark on choices that may appear – and the visuals of the game will visually morph into a storybook when you reach a major narrative moment. The words on the accompanying page will spell out what lead you to this moment – and then, you get to choose what comes next. From your charms, you will have a selection that best suits this situation; and selecting one will drive your story forward. This is the core hook of the game – a choose-your-own-adventure style narrative that is all too familiar to someone with a youth that revolved around pre-teen adventure novels.

This looks like a scene from a Disney film – I’d be expecting a song at any moment

As with those same choose-your-own-adventure novels, you may find your adventure suddenly cut short – an outcome of a decision leading to a dead end, a path cut short by some malevolent force or mistake. On paper, you’d imagine such a concept possibly being frustrating – especially when such an outcome may come up to 45 minutes after you made that initial choice, and now realising that you will need to go back to that initial decision and try something else. Thankfully, the entire experience of Beacon Pines is built to embrace this concept as these dead ends are not cheap thrills – they are illuminating looks at the darker secret of the town in their own right.

The game’s narrative feels like a comforting hand on the small of your back, guiding you safely through story beats. But in an instant you can come to realise that the same hand is actually at your throat – and even quicker still the game will calmly announce that your story has ended. In a heartbeat you will question how things took such a sharp turn, before calmly selecting your last branching story choice – with the same warm hand now resting gently at your back once more, until once again it may brush across your windpipe.

When in doubt, go for the shins

This gentle rise and fall of tone is masterfully presented, as your actions uncover more and more of a deeper plot with every dead end, for these dramatic outcomes are far from pointless. Motivations for some characters will become apparent, even as you rewind to a story path where your dismal fate did not come to be – those motivations will still persist, albeit now safely tucked away in your suspicions.

The pick-a-path novels of my youth would be happy to slap me with out-there endings, characters suddenly becoming malicious against their nature for a stand-alone shock twist, but Beacon Pines respects its cast too much to cheap out in such a way. If you discover that Greg the pie man is part of the illuminati in a crash ending, you can bet that he still works for the illuminati once you restart your narrative branch – even if this branch doesn’t include the ‘Illuminati Bake-off’ scene.

The best story branch choices: ‘Chill’ or ‘Shit’

The actual presentation of your choices is magnificent, represented within the game as a beautiful tree that actually proliferates its limbs as the narrative branches you are exploring. You can view this chronicle at any time to note how your current progress may be stacking up against previous dead ends; handy for the times where uncovering a new Charm may actually present a new option on a previous dead end. Perhaps your last attempt at a particular narrative point went spectacularly badly with the charms you had at the time – but now that choice clearly displays the option of a charm you recently acquired. Why not give it another try, and see how the outcome shifts?

Oops, forgot the hazard suit this time

I almost found myself a little bummed that there was not more opportunity to experiment with your Charms. The creativity with the game’s characters electrified the idea of throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks – but I can appreciate that the care and attention that went into the myriad of story beats deserves so much more than me trying to shoe-horn the word SHIT into any and all narrative choices. Having a small selection of curated charms at the time of a choice ensured that your current plot thread feels tight and discernible from others, rather than polluting it with noise for the sake of a throwaway gag as you type ‘punch man in face’ within the Leisure Suit Larry games of old.

I am seeing a theme with these dialogue screenshots

My only real disappointment came towards the end of the game, when suddenly the conversation mechanic shifted and was actually allowing me to make use of Charms in regular conversation. Rather than impacting a huge narrative choice, I was instead making granular decisions to communicate with established characters. As the game was at its climax, I felt that this was a feature used to encourage reflection on what you had explored through your narrative adventure. But in retrospect, it was such a clever and simplistic tool that I wondered if the entire game would have been elevated if it had existed from the very beginning.

Look, it may be the only trick I have – but it’s a good trick

Final Thoughts

While short, Beacon Pines is a master class in organic narrative discovery. Once you settle into its rhythm, and let go of the anxiety of knowing that a dark and depressing fate may be lurking behind any narrative choice, you piece together a story of hope, friendship and determination. Banish your nightmares and realise that the universe is not your enemy – instead, embrace change and all the potential that may come with it.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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