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Beneath a Steel Sky
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About the game
Beneath a Steel Sky is a point-and-click adventure set in a grim future, where most people live inside a few huge cities and the land between them has been left to die. Robert Foster grew up out there, in a stretch of desert called the Gap, until armed men arrive by helicopter and take him away without a word of explanation.
The flight ends badly over Union City, a vertical city where the poor work in the polluted towers at the top and the comfortable live safely below. Foster gets away from the wreck with one thing in his pocket: the circuit board that holds Joey, the sarcastic robot he built himself. Joey can move into any machine body you find for him, and he has an opinion on every one of them.
From there it is a matter of staying one step ahead of the city's security, talking your way through its factories, offices and back streets, and finding out why anyone went to the trouble of bringing you here. The story is serious, but the dialogue is full of dry jokes, and Joey steals most scenes he is in.
The backgrounds and characters were designed by Dave Gibbons, the comic book artist best known for Watchmen. The opening sequence that sets up the story is based on a comic he drew for the original box.
Playing it here
This is the CD version 1.2, with full speech, that Revolution Software released as freeware through the ScummVM project. It runs in ScummVM, compiled for the browser, with the original game files unchanged.
The first load takes a while: the game data is about 73 MB, plus about 6 MB for the engine, and everything downloads before the game starts. A bar shows the progress. Your saved games and settings stay in this browser.
Play with a mouse. The game uses both buttons, and on a touch screen a tap only works as a left click, so some actions are out of reach without a mouse.
A few lines of dialogue have no voice. That happens in the original release too; the text still appears on screen.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Left click | walk, look at things, talk to people |
| Right click | use or operate what you click (also how you pick things up) |
| Pointer at the top of the screen | open the inventory |
| Esc | skip a cutscene |
| . (period) | skip the current line of dialogue |
| P | pause |
| F5 | control panel: save, load, options |
| Ctrl+F5 | ScummVM menu |
A few things worth knowing
Try both buttons on everything. Left click tells you what Foster sees; right click is how he actually does something with it. Many puzzles come from using an item on something else: choose it in the inventory, then click what you want to use it on.
Keep Joey around. He comments on almost everything, and some of his remarks are hints. In some places he can do things Foster cannot.
You can die. Unlike many adventures of its time, this one has a few dangerous moments. Save often from the control panel (F5), and keep more than one save.
Talk to everyone more than once. Conversations change as you learn more, and people mention names and places you will need later.
Credits and licence
Beneath a Steel Sky was developed by Revolution Software and published by Virgin Interactive in 1994, for DOS and the Amiga. Revolution released it as freeware in 2003, together with the ScummVM project, under a licence that allows free distribution with its readme and notices intact. The original readme, with the full licence text, is linked from this page. All game content is © Revolution Software Ltd.
The game runs in ScummVM, by the ScummVM Team, free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. We compile it for the browser with only the engines our games use; the complete source code of this build is linked from the licences page.