Beacon Pines [Review]
Beacon Pines is a choose-your-own-adventure book brought to life. To streamline the concept, Beacon Pins acts like a Mad Lib; as you explore the game and search for anything and everything, you will unlock words. These words can then be used later when you get to a story element that allows you to change things. You usually get to choose from three or so words that you can use. What’s interesting about this game is that if you find a word much later on in the game, you can essentially go back in time to use it at an earlier part of the game. This allows players to change the story from the beginning and see what branching paths you missed. The game very much encourages you to retry choices with different words and even has a feature that makes it easy for the player to go back. No reloading save files here.
Beacon Pines was developed by Hiding Spot and published by both Fellow Traveler and Limited Run Games. Its story follows a young deer named Luka, who has lost both his parents. Desperate to find his missing mother, he spends the first day of summer exploring a new and dangerous area in hopes that she might show up. This story follows a classic storybook format with a narrator and everything. The narrator acts as your guide and takes you through the story, informing the reader (the player) of the history of the Beacon Pines town and the individual characters that make up the town. The soothing music and sound effects do a good job of immersing players in this wonderfully crafted world and I might add, the world-building is superb.
This game has a wonderful and heart-gripping story, with an innocent boy, unfortunately, needing to grow up fast and Unfortunately learn the feeling of loss and how dangerous the world can be. Unfortunately there isn't much I can say about this game without spoiling the story. The game, at its core, is a story-driven point-and-click game with gameplay twists that differentiate it from any other game in the genre. Beacon Pines is available for Mac, PC, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
