It’s the insidiousness of Spankles that bothers me at first.
It’s a small thing at first, of course. It almost always is. Even before you breach Union City’s walls, there’s a kiosk giving away free cans of the stuff – actually, there’s a lot of vending machines that give away the stuff. “Wow!”, you think, dispensing a can for gratis for the first time. “A benevolent government that gives away free refreshments? I’m in!”
Beyond a Steel Sky reviewDeveloper: Revolution SoftwarePublisher: Revolution SoftwarePlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Out now on PC and iOS as part of Apple Arcade.
And then you’ll spot another ad. And then another. The Spankles mascot – a nightmarish hybrid of Ronald McDonald and the terrifying clown from Poltergeist that haunted my early years – leers at you from… well, everywhere. You start pondering why there are advertisements at all given they’re issuing cans for free, anyway. Later, you might realise the tagline – “Explodes your mind!” – is a tad sinister. You wonder why they’re pushing it so hard. A health scanner will eventually recommend it, and that’s when it becomes impossible to ignore the distant alarm bell chiming in the back of your head.
A dystopian cityscape is nothing new, of course. You’ll jog gently along, weaving between the unhurried folk with their multicoloured hairdos and futuristic fashions, camera flicked upward to take in the full majesty of this stylish metropolis and its neon lights, and there’s a jarring sense of deja vu here. Ryan’s Rapture. Comstock’s Columbia. Cyberpunk’s Nivalis. And now we’re in Beyond a Steel Sky’s Union City.