What makes a great mystery? A small cast of characters, all with secrets and personal agendas? A series of tantalising clues? A brave but vulnerable investigator? A locked room—or perhaps a hermetically sealed starship, hurtling through space, where tensions increase over time and threaten to boil over?
Between Horizons makes great use of its setting—a generation ship, flying through space to form a colony on another planet—to weave a tale about individual choice and collective responsibility. It asks whether leaders, such as the captain of a spaceship, should be given total control—including over as yet unborn children—or whether ordinary people should take matters into their own hands. Tying this all together are some very focused gameplay systems which eschew distractions to hone in exclusively on investigation and deduction. It’s a heady brew that engaged my brain and emotions in equal measure.
You play as Stella, daughter of the security chief aboard the starship Zephyr. Things on Earth are falling apart, so humanity decides to send several starships into the void to settle colonies on habitable planets. The catch is that these are generation ships, meaning that the original crew will eventually die, passing on their responsibilities to their children and grandchildren.
Like all good sci fi, Between Horizons conjures a world ripe with moral and philosophical dilemmas, and then wastes no time exploring them. Should the first generation crew retain control, even as they grow old? Should the passengers have a say in how the mission is conducted, or only the crew? Is it a good idea that children born on the ship inherit their parents’ profession?
Stella is part of the second generation, destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to live her whole life on board the Zephyr, taking on her father’s role as security chief when he dies, never having seen Earth, and with no realistic hope of being alive when the ship reaches its ultimate destination. Without giving too much away, the story burrows into the challenges and contradictions of live aboard a generation ship, and Stella finds herself at the centre of events as they unfold, slowly at first, and then with explosive consequences.
The gameplay is tightly focused, with no loose ends. There’s no combat, no platforming, no side activities. You’ll speak to crew members, walk through the ship gathering clues, which will be memorialised in your PDA. You’ll be assigned cases to investigate, which you can theoretically ‘solve’ immediately by simply offering an answer to the central question of the case and calling it a day. That would be like starting out a game of Cluedo by guessing that it was Professor Plum, in the Billiard Room, with the Candlestick. You might luck out and hit upon the correct answer, but probably not. So instead you follow the clues and gradually narrow things down until you’re sure (or fairly sure) you know the answer.
The main way you do this involves selecting pieces of evidence and showing them to specific characters. Much of the challenge comes from figuring out who might know something about a particular clue. These cases felt like real mysteries rather than video-gamey puzzles, because they require real deduction and logical thinking to solve. The more I played, the more I realised that the real game was taking place inside my head. Sure, the PDA helped me sift through the evidence, but it was always a leap of deduction in my own mind that helped me to crack the case. Between Horizons reminded me how often video games present players with an apparent mystery, only to effectively solve it on their behalf after a bit of gameplay or a few scripted dialogue options. That’s not the case here. You’ll have to rely on your little grey brain cells to get you through—and that feels great.
At its heart, Between Horizons is about delivering those moments when you use your noggin to smartly piece together information and clues, feeling jolly clever when you get it right. Between bouts of head scratching deduction, the game tells a story that is tense and surprisingly deep given it’s short run time. There are occasional dialogue choices that Stella can make—including some very impactful ones, near the end of the game—but don’t be fooled into thinking this is an RPG. There are different endings, and the narrative will continue even if you offer the wrong answer to a particular case, but this is not a game where you make your own story. The overall contours of the plot remain the same no matter what you do, which was fine by me, since it allows the story to be carefully crafted and well-paced.
I do have one or two small complaints. Due to the tightly scripted nature of the cases, it’s not possible to ask characters certain straightforward questions—or really any questions at all. You can only show them a piece of evidence and see if they react, and if it’s not the specific evidence the game thinks you should be showing them at that moment, they’ll spit out a generic line about not understanding what you’re asking, which sometimes broke my immersion. You’ll also find yourself traipsing backwards and forwards across the ship, bouncing between clues and conversations, or simply searching for your next lead. This is fine for a while but eventually gets tedious.
The art style is 2.5D, meaning the characters and many objects are pixelated, while the ship itself has several layers that you can move between, giving an impression of depth. It’s a nice style that suits the game. The Zephyr is depicted with a consistent orange and black colour palette throughout, which looks cool, but does mean that some rooms and corridors start to blend together. The soundtrack is consistently excellent, even though only a few ambient tracks play on loop as you poke around the ship. I felt like I’d wandered into a jazz club in the middle of the movie Blade Runner, which is exactly how I want to feel in a game like this.
By the end of my seven hour playthrough, the story reached a climax that was both surprising and satisfying. I was thrilled to see story beats that were introduced early on paying off in the final act. Like any good thriller, all the main characters have something to hide and flaws that run deep, but they are not cartoon villains. Even the characters stirring up trouble are doing so for reasons that are entirely understandable, maybe even noble. Without giving too much away, by the end of the story you’ll be questioning who is really right—the established authorities, or the troublesome upstarts—and will be invited to act on your conclusions.
I’ve rarely been so impressed with the story and writing in a game, or felt so satisfied with the way I’d been challenged to think my way through it. The end screen informed me that I’d solved 8/10 cases correctly and apprehended some, though not all, of the conspirators. That felt about right. I’d made some logical deductions, played some hunches, and come up with a messy solution that felt close to the truth. Somehow, it wouldn’t have felt right if I’d achieved a completely ‘correct’ outcome, which shows just how much I got sucked into this game’s complex, noirish world.
At a time when so many games are full of bloated content and tacked-on mechanics, Between Horizons is an all-killer-no-filler tale that I heartily recommend to anyone who likes science fiction, mysteries, or simply a great story well told.
