Beyond Good & Evil Review

Beyond Good and Evil hands you a camera before it hands you a weapon, and that ordering is the whole design. Jade is a reporter, so the verbs are photograph, document, and publish, and proving what the Alpha Sections are doing to Hillys is the mechanic rather than a cutscene reward. It is a satire of state propaganda made in 2003 that has aged into something closer to prophecy, and the writing carries characters most games would fumble, above all Pey'j, whose bond with Jade does more with a handful of lines than most scripts manage in forty hours.

Hillys is small and dense, a lighthouse orphanage, a canal city, and a mine reachable by hovercraft, and the art direction holds up precisely because it never chased photorealism. What holds it back is the play. Combat is simple to the point of thin, the stealth sections are forgiving in ways that drain the tension, and the game ends abruptly on a sequel hook that has now gone more than twenty years unanswered.

It sold badly into a crowded holiday season that included Ubisoft's own Prince of Persia. The A is for what it says and how beautifully it says it, not for how it fights.