Between Horizons

Review

Your name is Stella.  You’re the security assistant on the Zephyr spaceship, which is on its way to the star Eurus-d, a suitable planet for humans located four lightyears away from Earth. Its mission is to settle the planet for the survival of humankind. Thirty three years into its mission, a chain of events puts the success of the ship's mission and its 1,300 cohabitants in danger. Now promoted to the chief of security, it is up to you to investigate these events and save the mission in Between Horizons.

Between Horizons is a sci-fi point-and-click pixelated adventure game developed by DigiTales Interactive and published by Assemble Entertainment on the 26^th of March 2024 on the Steam platform.

The game is presented as a side-scroller and consists of a very well-structured story with ten cases to solve. Most cases are average in difficulty, while a couple might take some time and deduction to complete. The game offers a couple of endings. Playtime is around 10 hours, which is pretty good for that genre of games.

The story takes place on the spaceship, Zephyr, and has seven different areas to explore, with many NPCs that Stella will need to talk to to gather information for her cases. She will also have a scanner on her suit that can be activated by pressing the space key on your keyboard, allowing her to collect evidence within the rooms. At the start of the game, only a few areas will be accessible, but more will unlock as Stella successfully resolves cases. It might take some time to run from one part of the ship to another, but you can also use the fast travel option on the map by clicking on a specific room. Then, Stella will appear out of the transport station that’s nearest your selected room, and will walk the distance to get to the room. This option will be helpful later on in the game.

Stella’s PDA can be accessed at any time by pressing the TAB key. A few options will be available: the cases, the evidence, the comms and the map tabs. The cases tab will display the current cases you are working on. The evidence tabs will display items, people, and devices Stella has come across during cases, and the comms tabs will show all the discussions she’s had with the relevant people in those cases.

To resolve cases, you will have to choose a character, a room, or a device. I strongly recommend revisiting Stella's communications before making a choice on a character. As mentioned, you might need to create a schematic to figure out a couple of cases.

I made a bad choice in one case by not talking to a specific character.  The result was that Stella shot a suspect dead. Unbeknownst to me until the next scene, this suspect held the remaining numbers of the server code that I needed. Thank god it was only two letters, and as a result, it was a guessing game for a while, but as I had the first and last number of the code, it was too long to resolve the puzzle. And, of course, at the end of the game, Stella and I needed to make the last decision for one specific ending.

The developers have done a sterling job with Between Horizons, and it is as good as their first game Lacuna. The tutorial is brilliant. Once in a while, when you find new things a pop-up will appear and explain how to use them.

Great pixel graphics, and the soundtrack is excellent. There are some scenes with voice-overs, which are well executed. I didn’t encounter any issues throughout my gameplay.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Between Horizons Steam Store Page