Preview – Sky Beneath [Demo] PC
I always love to see a dev team get invested in their own world’s lore. It’s easy to tell when people are working on something they care about and it shows with Sky Beneath. Thankfully what snippets of the story one can scavenge from the twenty-minute demo also seem to be well written and don’t consist of boring exposition dumps, as too frequently occurs with narrative-focused games. Right away the player is thrown into an alien facility in search of gravity-manipulation tech where, not only are you taught the main mechanics of the game via a collect-a-thon time-trial, but also get to learn about the protagonist and her partner, their history and motivations, and discover more about the planet itself. Tidbits of information about the lifeforms that flourished before you and why the characters are trapped there in the first place trickle through the comms and scavenged documents, topped off with platforming and puzzle-solving centred around the ability to change the direction of gravity, much like the awesome Gravity Rush games.
Although the controls feel a bit clunky and the amount of detail in the environments can make it tricky to easily see exactly what needs to be done, Sky Beneath lends itself to being quite the engaging challenge should the full game (scheduled for release at some point this year) continue on the same trend as the demo. With a steady stream of new mechanics to widen possibilities, as well as the promise of extra challenges in the form of hidden collectibles and time-trials, there’s an opportunity to reach up with some of the other greats in the genre, like Magrunner and Quantum Conundrum. As a winner of an EPIC MegaGrant the team has a lot to live up to in terms of innovation and I can only hope they are up to the task.