The Pale Beyond

Lore & Background

The Pale Beyond is set aboard the Temperance, a ship on an Antarctic expedition to find the lost sister ship, the Viscount. The player controls Robin Shaw, a blank-slate protagonist hired as First Mate by Captain Rufus Hunt. After Hunt disappears a month into the journey, Shaw becomes acting captain and must manage the crew through the polar winter. The game features an ensemble cast including specialists such as brothers Grimley and Yoren Stoke, navigator Kurt Darling, engineer Clive Hammond, chief science officer Richard Templeton, photographer Kasha Bellford, doctor Arthur Nutlee, and kennel master Lady Cordell, along with sixteen minor characters.

Gameplay revolves around weekly resource management of food, fuel, and 'decorum'—the ship's morale. The player makes decisions on crew requests, settling disputes, and maintaining loyalty, with consequences that can lead to ruin. Rations expire, requiring hunting, and coal fuel depletes rapidly. The 'locked tree' system lets players change outcomes by deleting newer saves or choosing load points after completing a game.

The story progresses from the stranded ship to an ice camp, then to a volcanic island. Shaw must choose between heading for the coast to await rescue or inland to discover the Viscount's fate. Inland, Shaw finds the Viscount with a mysterious tree on its deck, and Hunt reveals the tree's fruit grants perception of multiple timelines. The ending depends on crew loyalty and survival, with outcomes including pardon, arrest, or being left stranded.

Reader's Guide

The Pale Beyond represents the debut title from Saltstone Studios, a small Belfast-based developer founded by Thomas Hislop and Michael Bell. The studio's earlier projects—a cancelled mobile game, a failed game, and a World of Warcraft mod shut down by Blizzard—taught the team to narrow their scope. The game draws inspiration from historical Antarctic expeditions such as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition, and Franklin's lost expedition, as well as the books The Lost Men and Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. Its significance lies in its narrative-driven survival mechanics and the 'locked tree' system, which encourages replayability by allowing players to alter outcomes. The game's focus on crew management and moral decisions, set against a fictional early 20th-century British imperial backdrop, distinguishes it within the survival role-playing genre.

Did You Know?

• Saltstone Studios was founded by Thomas Hislop and Michael Bell, who met while taking programming courses at Queen's University Belfast.
• The player character Robin Shaw is a blank-slate protagonist whose background and personality are defined as the story unfolds, with the narrative avoiding gendered pronouns.