Are you wanting to fulfill your desire to play as a law enforcement officer on a spaceship in the future? Well, Between Horizons will meet that aspiration, though possibly not in a way that's satisfying. This is a game that I'd say gives a good first impression that unfortunately didn't sustain that enjoyment.
You play as Stella, the daughter of the chief of security on a ship that's part of a generations long mission to send humans to a different planet to terraform and colonize because Earth is in dire shape, though not dire enough to keep people from living on it or to apparently develop new technology. I guess the implication is that Earth's potential to continue supporting the cancer that is the human race is about to reach 0, and unlike real life, they really do mean it this time. I suppose now's a good time to mention that this is one of those narrative games that claims to alter its story based on the decisions you make and has multiple endings, and I'll come back to this later, but its possible there are story bits I didn't get on my playthrough. The planet that's chosen to become the new home for humans however will apparently take hundreds of years to reach, so the crew and populace that took part in this mission won't live to see the ship arrive at its destination. The idea being that the people are supposed to procreate and their offspring will be the ones to see the mission to its conclusion. However, Stella is asked to investigate a case that unfortunately results in her father being killed, as well as the discovery of some kind of insurrection group that doesn't want to continue this mission that their forebearers chose for them. The setting is definitely a compelling one and does bring up interesting questions to ponder. Should children carry on the tasks of the parents, how much control should be employed upon an enclosed populace, etc.
Visuals wise, Between Horizons is a mix of 2D pixel art and (as long you stick with the 3D setting that the game has by default) a 3D voxel graphics, which helps to give it a unique sci-fi style.
Now that I've got those 2 positives out of the way, I can now focus on all the negatives and annoyances that sadly left me feeling down on the game.
Going back to the story, while it does have an interesting hook, it doesn't really maintain that interest throughout. Part of that is down to none of the characters being all that fleshed out. Case in point, in my playthrough, from the choices I had made, I ended up [spoiler] shooting one of the crew members that I had spoken to maybe twice before because said crew member locked Stella up in a chamber and then proceeded to charge her after she freed herself. Stella then was very upset over what transgressed, and while I can understand being sad because you had to end someone's life, I barely remembered who that crew member was and yet Stella seemed like she had lost a close friend. [/spoiler] Another issue is that most of the story is told to us rather than being shown to us, often times via Stella doing a voiced narration describing what happened on the ship after certain events transpired and/or describing how Stella is feeling about the situation. I suppose the last issue I had the story itself is that I didn't side with the insurrection group's actions and decisions at all. Call me a facist, but nothing shown in the game gave me any indication that the people in charge were being overly controlling, especially seeing as how these people are on a ship that's meant to help ensure the future of the human race. Yes, I know that a big motivation for the insurrection group is that many of its members didn't choose to partake in this mission (their parents did) and they would like a choice on what they do with their lives [spoiler] and yes I know that there's apparently a closer planet that might support human life, but it still comes off as children throwing a tantrum about being told to do something and them not wanting to do it because they don't want to. [/spoiler]
"Okay, so they story didn't keep you engaged. What about the detective gameplay?"
Between Horizons makes the "interesting" decision to let you submit any answer to a case, even if the one you submit you know is wrong. The idea is that the story will change depending on the answers you submit to the case, as well as other choices you make in dialogue scenes. As such, Between Horizons is a game without a failure state, which I concluded I don't care for. It just makes each case feel less like a problem to solve that results in me feeling clever (or stupid) and more just another choice in a dialogue scene. I think its because of this design decision that most of these cases feel very obtuse and hard to figure out. I really did wonder if I'm just an idiot, but based on other reviews and comments I read, many people seemed to agree that yeah, a lot of these case are very difficult and often feels like you have to just pick at random and hope you got the right answer (assuming you're even trying to solve all the cases with the "correct" answer). And if you think you can just save scum, you can't because the game only has 1 save slot and no manual saves (only auto-saves). I've also played enough of these "choices matters" games, and listened to enough people dissect these games of games, to know that these supposed changes are mostly very superficial and not as grand as the game would like you to believe.
There's also plenty of design decisions that make the experience more tedious than it needs to be. For instance, you can't fast travel to any specific room. The best the game offers is just being able to fast travel to 1 of the train stations in each of the 4 main areas. I guess the idea was to force you to have to wonder the ship to get a feel for the environment, but when you're constantly trying to find people or going to different rooms to try to find a clue to a case, you REALLY begin to wish you could just warp to the different rooms. Speaking of hunting people down, there's many times where you have to talk to specific people. Unfortunately, many of these people will end up changing to a different location when you last spoke to them, and the only way to find them again is to scour the ship. This is particularly galling since everyone on the ship has a communication device, so why can't Stella just call these people and say "hey, I need to talk to you in person, where can I find you?" Finally, you can't change the order of all the evidence you collect throughout the game. Each piece of evidence you get goes into your evidence inventory, and you have throughout the game. Stupidly however, the evidence is only capable of being listed in order of when you get them (with the most recent being on top and the oldest being on the bottom). You can make it so that only certain kinds of evidence is displayed (like people or locations), but that's it. I also wish instead of the evidence being listed as an icon based grid, you could change it to be say a list of text (that you could maybe organize alphabetically) on the left and then the icon and description of the evidence being on the right.
Prior to me thinking things over, I did believe I was still going to give this a thumbs up on Steam. However, after I pondered things out, I don't agree with my initial assessment.
