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An opening monologue helpfully informs you that your first task is to get Joey running. Your only possession is a circuit board containing the personality of your home-made robotic friend, Joey. Part 1: The Top LevelДЄfter the subtly animated comic strip opening, you take the role of Rob Foster and find yourself trapped in an industrial zone high among the polluted clouds of Union City. For me, itвЂ™s interesting to see how some parts of the game are very linear, requiring you to do exactly the right things in the right order, whereas other parts are more freeform and there are a couple of different puzzles you can work on at the same time. I hope you enjoy tracing the paths through this game. Red represents items that are found in one section but arenвЂ™t used until the next.ДЄlthough there is some back and forth between the different levels, IвЂ™ve split the game up into four main sections вЂ“ the Top level (with the factories), the 2nd level (with the shops and simple living quarters), the ground level (with the rich people and their clubs) and the underground (where your destiny awaits!) Dark blue blocks are used to explain actions such as using an inventory item.

YouвЂ™re going to be talking to a lot of different people! Yellow represents inventory objects which become much more prominent in the LINCspace sections of the game. ThereвЂ™s a colour key at the top of each graph to tell you what the different colours mean.Д«enASS has a lot of bright green blocks вЂ“ these represents conversations. In the charts below, colour coding is used to represent different locks and keys.

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My full graphml file for BenASS can be downloaded here if you want to play with it.

ThereвЂ™s also a browser version, yED Live, for creating and viewing the graphml files.

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I create my PDCs using the free yEd Graph Editor. This tells you what order you need to solve the puzzles, or if there are many parallel routes through the game. PDCs show all the locks and keys as blocks and lines between them show how they depend on one another. But good games have many conceptually varied locks and keys such as guards or goats you need to distract, information you need to obtain in conversations, or logic puzzles to solve. A lock might literally be a lock on a door that requires a key to open.

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IвЂ™ve been refining the way I create Puzzle Dependency Charts since I first wrote about them in June 2019, using LucasArtsвЂ™ The Dig as an example and then the flawed but fun Detective Di.Д«riefly, a puzzle game can be thought of as a series of locks that bar progress and keys which open the locks. Is Beneath a Steel Sky really the classic itвЂ™s held up to be? IвЂ™ll be analysing its structure using four Puzzle Dependency Charts that map out the whole game.

In the meantime, I went back to BenASS to see how it compares. IвЂ™ll wait for a few more patches come out. And though it has now been patched enough that I could play it beginning to end, itвЂ™s not yet sufficiently fixed to warrant playing a second time or do a full analysis. This was supposed to be an analysis of Beyond a Steel Sky, Revolution SoftwareвЂ™s newly released sequel to their 1990s cyberpunk thriller Beneath a Steel Sky.