The Pale Beyond celebrates one year out on the ice!
Set sail for the voyage of a lifetime by grabbing the game for 50% off and checking out the developer interview below!
A massive congratulations to the Bellular Studios team, who today celebrate the one-year anniversary of The Pale Beyond! 🎉🎉🎉 The game launched into icy waters on 25 February 2023 and kept us on our toes with its demanding choices and dangerous consequences.
We’ve put together a competition for those Captains who love to pick up collectibles - sign up for your chance to win one of five Collector’s Editions with Steam codes of The Pale Beyond by jumping on Twitter/X and responding to our competition post with the hardest decision you had to make in The Pale Beyond.
To celebrate the anniversary, the game is currently on sale for 50% on Steam! While you’re waiting for your game to download, check out our chat below with the developers from Bellular Studios.
Q: Happy Anniversary to The Pale Beyond, and congratulations on hitting such a big milestone! How has the team found the voyage since launch?
A: Launch was both exhilarating and a stressful experience. With it being our first time launching a commercial game, there was an awful lot we had to learn on the fly, from community management, bug fixing live software, and interacting directly with our players.
It was immensely gratifying to finally put The Pale Beyond in the hands of players, and see them become similarly attached to the characters and the setting we’d created.
More than anything we’ve learned lots about the importance of QA, and how we could best like to approach subsequent launches.
Following the inevitable emotional and physical crash that comes with releasing something you’ve worked on for four years, we were able to take some time, and restructure things for our next projects. James Bruce, our audio director on The Pale Beyond, will be the creative director on our next project.
Now we’ve got a successful launch under our belt, our next priority is making sure we’re operating a sustainable and ethical business. Especially given the current instability that’s passing through the wider games industry at the moment.
To continue to provide job security and a healthy working environment for our team is a dream come true. We mustn’t take any success we’ve had so far for granted, and owe everything to the team, our players, the Bellular YouTube team, and of course our publisher and Northern Ireland Screen.
Q: What made you want to create a game that explores (haha) the harsh realities of exploration? Did you ever want to be an explorer yourself?
A: Finding yourself starting a business in your early 20s and staying in the same city for that decade certainly instils an inherent wanderlust that’s hard to not want to chase.
The biggest draw was of course the real life expeditions and histories that captured our imagination. (I’ll include a reading list for anyone interested.)
We think it’s important to take inspiration from history and art outside of games as a medium. That’s not only good business sense when considering under-served market niches in games, but it helps to keep your work fresh and keep you on a frontier, artistically speaking.
It’s impossible to not put yourself in your own work, despite how much you chase the death of the author, ironically or otherwise. We couldn’t help but to find some affinity with the explorers of old. Not to draw the equivalency, but trying to steer a game studio in a part of the world without veteran talent, during a time of harsh economic realities, certainly encouraged me to seek advice from the more successful explorers of old. Just replace the ice with esoteric Windows Operating system bugs and buggy console port errors.
Furthermore, we found that many of the expeditions we drew inspiration from had very local links. I’ve met many around Belfast who can say they were directly descended from some of the expeditions we studied, with a few even doing research doctorates of their own on the subject. Whether it’s Tom Crean’s pub in the republic, or the history of shipbuilding in Belfast, the history is very tangible and alive here.
Q: The Pale Beyond elicits stress, hopelessness, fear, and unfairness. Why and how did you go about eliciting those feelings in players?
A: The specific flavour of stress we set out to elicit, is really a combination of several things. It’s a convergence of narrative, design balancing, audio, artwork and narrative design. The goal was to retain immersion for as long as possible and make the game ‘feel cold’. So cold that the warmth of the characters is all you have to keep going. Despite the hopelessness of the setting and the story, we always pushed that to juxtapose it against the thin vein of hope that a good Robin Shaw can follow.
Q: What made you choose a polar exploration instead of another location?
A: We knew we wanted a setting that had inherent stakes to elevate a branching narrative story. We noticed that there was countless movies, documentaries, books and artwork about the setting, but few notable games (at least at the time of starting development, ’The Terror’ Season 1 game out in the middle of production for us.
Once we became acquainted with the histories and source materials, we knew there was a design challenge worth solving in order to create something we feel is very special.
Q: Which games or pop culture were your biggest inspirations for The Pale Beyond?
A: Mechanically speaking we were hugely inspired by the work of Lucas Pope, as well as the fantastic King & Dad simulator that is ‘Yes, Your Grace’. (See reading list)
From an audio perspective, we took inspiration from the BBC sound archives, as well as various composers, from Max Richter, to Michael Gianchinno & Miklós Rózsa.
An otherwise under-reported inspiration for the somewhat controversial ending to the game (that players seemed to either love or hate) was Stealing Fire, by Stephen Kotler & Jamie Wheal. It’s where we came up with the name for the game, ironically at a bar with a large blossom tree, where I first met ’Tree’ (James Bruce) the audio director in 2017 working the whiskey bar.
I’ll not get too far into it, but there’s one steam forum player who’s cracked the case regarding the real nature of the game’s strange ending, despite the otherwise completely grounded experience. I swear it’s not just a pun about branching narrative.
The most consistent inspiration outside of the research is that every member of the team brought their own passion and voice to the project. I consider it a continual achievement to get to work with these people on a daily basis. They inspire me through thick and thin.
Q: The Pale Beyond had a very positive reception, the game has resonated with many people. What were some of your favourite reactions from fans?
A: Probably our most favourite responses outside of the amazing works of fan art, has been the amount of players and streamers who have uploaded playthroughs where they’ve voiced the cast themselves. It’s a very tangible instance of feeling connected to your players. Shout out to BoringDadGaming for what I’d personally consider the definitive VO for now (give or take a few of the Irish accents).
Q: Can you tell us what’s next for Bellular Studios?
A: Without giving the goose away, I can tell you that we’ve another title in the works, that’s being directed be the endlessly talented James Bruce. We’ve also got some further updates left for Pale that we’d like to roll out when the time is right.
Otherwise, outside of further larger titles, we’re also wanting to expand into more short form experimental games on the side, and continue to work closely with our player base where possible earlier in development.
For now, I’ll tell you that I’m reading Edible Economics by Ha-Joon Chang, if you’d like some insight into what the Appertton Tinning Co. might be up to. I’ve also recently watched and adored ‘The Taste of Things’ by Anh Hung Tran.
We’re certainly not going anywhere, and want to keep exploring and expanding the universe we created for The Pale Beyond.
Films, Television & Documentaries list:
The Terror (Season 1) – AMC, 2019
Scott of the Antarctic – Charles Frend, 1948
Encounters at the End of the World – Verner Hezog, 2009
Antarctica, A Year on the Ice - Anthony Powell, 2013
The Last Great Race on Earth (Sledding Dog public access documentary) – 1982
The Endurance - George Butler, 2000
Books on The Endurance:
The true story of Shackleton’s incredible voyage to the Antarctic – Alfred Langsing, 1959
South with Endurance (Photo book) – Frank Hurley, 2001
The Lost Men – Kelly Tyler-Lewis, 2006
South – Ernest Shackleton, 1919
Philosophy for Polar Explorers – Erling Kagge Hoosh, Jason C. Anthony, 2012