"What will ye do, when steel hearts break, and courage does abscond?" reads the penultimate line of The Pale Beyond’s poetic prologue. Actually, it’s less of a poem and more a call to action: how on earth will you keep a ragtag bunch of sailors alive in the harshest conditions on the planet? If you hadn’t already twigged, The Pale Beyond is a narrative survival sim that puts you in the frostbitten boots of First Mate aboard The Temperance - a coal guzzling steam ship that set out on a polar expedition in search of its sister, The Viscount, which went missing five years prior. As Captain Hunt’s second-in-command, you’ll take daily requests from the crew, manage the food rations, and settle petty squabbles on the poop deck.
Beginning life as a way for co-founders Michael Bell and Thomas Hislop to create World of Warcraft mods, Bellular Studios grew alongside its gaming and Warcraft YouTube channels into a fully-fledged development team based out of their hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Pale Beyond is their debut game that fittingly draws on Ireland’s rich maritime history, although, as Hislop tells me, this wasn’t always the plan. "We initially didn’t set out to do so, but it quickly emerged as a core influence that we kept finding ourselves drawn back to," he says. "The further we delved into the golden age of exploration, and its very local routes, the more it resonated with us personally."