Between Horizons

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Between Horizons + Lacuna Bundle, along with Lacuna.)

Between Horizons is a Graphic Adventure released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Taking place on a generational ship headed for a colony far from Earth, players take the role of Stella, who finds herself conducting an investigation into a conspiracy that threatens the safety of everyone onboard the massive vessel.

The presentation in Between Horizons uses a blend of 2D pixel art characters and backgrounds mixed with 3D spacing and nice lighting seemingly intended to mimic the “HD-2D” visuals of games like Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy, though it lacks those titles’ visual flair and atmospheric effects. This is all backed by a subdued synthesized soundtrack that does a good job reflecting both the sci-fi setting as well as the dark secrets the game tasks you with uncovering.

I think there’s a lot of potential for stories set in a generational ship, exploring the point of view of people who will spend their entire lives in transition, never having experienced the place they came from and knowing they will never see their destination. And to this game’s credit, Between Horizons does a superb job building the reality of this story. Throughout the game, you will meet some people who are dissatisfied with their existence and see the leadership as tyrannical, some who aren’t happy with their lives but accept things as they are, and even some who fully subscribe to the ideals and goals of the ship’s mission, feeling like they’re working toward a better tomorrow despite knowing they’ll never see that tomorrow. And then there’s people like Stella, who seems to keep her head down and focus on the task at hand rather than contend with the bigger questions about the mission itself. This makes for a lot of good potential for great storytelling.

Having said that, I don’t feel like I really see this great story materialize. We’re not given much of an opportunity to see everyday life on the ship before worrisome events start to unfold, don’t get much of a chance to meet the characters, or see the rising tensions on the ship before they come to a head.

Even basic questions about the main character are left in the air – the game starts with Stella receiving a message from her mother on Earth, but… how does that work, exactly? Was Stella born on Earth as a child and brought onto the ship, and if so why were her and her father separated from her mother? Is one or both of Stella and her mother a clone? Was cryogenic sleep involved? And how does Stella feel about any of this? Perhaps these questions are answered farther into the story, but the fact that they’re not addressed in some form right from the start, even a form that retains the mystery of the situation, robs us of a character-establishing moment that we never seem to get.

Another major issue here are the game mechanics. It’s odd that someone in Stella’s position never seems to delegate tasks to others in her investigation unit, but I suppose making the player do everything is more conducive to the gameplay, though I do feel like the game goes a bit too far by making players hoof it around everywhere on the massive ship, with players often needing to head to numerous far apart places to find what they need. To its credit, there is a fast-travel system of sorts, though not only does this come with annoying load times, but it often only lets you travel to locations that are still quite a distance from your destination.

At the very least, Between Horizons does a good job setting up mysteries and making players search for clues to solve those mysteries, with players searching crime scenes for evidence, talking with witnesses and material experts to better contextualize that evidence, and then coming to their own conclusions about what that evidence means rather than dragging them along by the nose. To this end, Between Horizons brings back Lacuna’s signature mechanic of auto-saving and refusing to let players keep more than one save file, forcing them to live with the consequences of their decisions, including and bad calls they make in their investigations.

However, this rigid structure is really frustrating when the game often fails to give players enough tools to properly connect the dots in their investigations. At one point, I’m told that one of the criteria of a suspect is that they have a “Category 2” profession, but the game provides zero information on what this means. The game says I should ask everyone for information, but when I try to bring this topic up to them, they tell me “I don’t know why you’re asking about that” or “that’s something you have to figure out on your own”, despite that every adult in this setting should know the answer to this question. Later, I found information about an engineer who worked at a service terminal I need information on, but I had no information about where to find him to question him. Other investigators, the person who charged me with investigating the terminal, and someone who lives a few doors down from the engineer’s home all responded to me asking about the guy as if it was absurd that I would even bring him up when talking to them.

If I’m meant to look in a specific place for answers to important questions, the game should indicate where I need to look. If the game is going to give broad advice that I should ask around to find answers to questions, the game should have everyone helpfully nudge me in the right direction when I ask around, or at least make it so multiple people I’m likely to ask will point me where I need to look. But getting a stone wall from seemingly everyone, even people who know the answers to my questions and have no reason not to help me, even people who are desperately invested in the success of my investigations, is something I cannot see as anything but flawed game design.

Because of these issues, I found myself repeatedly frustrated while playing Between Horizons, and whenever I started to really feel like a detective, I invariably hit a wall of “so now what do I do?”, not because I didn’t have ideas of how to progress, but because I didn’t know what the game wanted me to do to progress. It’s so disappointing too, because the setting and overall story seem so full of potential, but flaws in both the storytelling and the gameplay leave that potential stranded in space.

tl;dr – Between Horizons is a Graphic Adventure that puts players in the role of an investigator on a colony ship trying to uncover a conspiracy that threatens the ship. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t do a great job setting up its characters and setting, and the gameplay suffers from multiple frustrations, including the game repeatedly refusing to indicate where you need to go to find information you’re looking for, even when the people you’re speaking with should be able to tell you. The result is a game that feels like so much missed potential.

Grade: C

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Most Disappointing

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