Demo offers early glimpse Beyond the Plastic Wall

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Full version of post-apocalyptic side-scroller coming to Windows and Mac on Steam later this year

People pour their hearts out in hand-written letters. (Or they used to, back when we used to write letters.) Read some and you're bound to feel an emotional connection to the person who wrote them. That's precisely what happens in Motvind Studios and ARTE France's upcoming Beyond the Plastic Wall, and its protagonist is determined to meet the woman behind them, even if he has to travel to the ends of the earth to reach her.

Mind you, in this game the planet is already near its end. Instead of a bustling modern society, all that's left now is a boundless ocean of water and deserted landscapes leading to the last remaining city. Against this backdrop, players control Hal, a man tormented by tragedy in his own past, who discovers "a sealed box of mysterious letters written by a woman he doesn’t know." With no real direction in his life anymore, Hal is determined to embark on a journey "across a strange and decaying world" to find her "deep within the walls" of the only surviving metropolis. Many obstacles stand in his path, but Hal is a scavenger with some useful mechanical abilities, and he "can't resist trying to fix the wrecked machines he encounters along the way."

Beyond the Plastic Wall takes players through a variety of brown-tinged post-apocalyptic environments, from "lonely shores to the narrow alleys and bustling skyscrapers of a city filled with grim secrets." As you traverse "rocky coastlines, crumbling infrastructures, and vast concrete expanses," the distinctive blend of "detailed pixel art and modern visual effects" brings to life (or perhaps post-life) a world that "feels both desolate and deeply human." At first glance, the experience might seem similar to other side-scrolling, gamepad- or keyboard-controlled puzzle-platformers of the Limbo and Inside ilk, but here you aren't strictly limited to a single plane of movement, and this "poetic 2.5D adventure" is much more narratively driven than most. Intermittent text narration teases out new insights into the woman behind the letters, and there are many characters to meet and talk to in your travels, from "a voyage with a proud but lonely boat captain to a confrontation with an angry fishmonger and unsettling brushes with the strange outcasts that hide in the shadows of the walled city." Each encounter peels back new layers of  an "emotional journey through isolation, memory, and the boundaries we build," bringing you "a little closer to the letters’ mysterious author and nearer to understanding the true reasons for your own voyage."

The gameplay, too, is based less on physics-based obstacles than usual and more on "tactile, hands-on puzzles grounded in mechanical logic." Whenever Hal encounters "forgotten machines of a bygone age" that are now broken and in need of restoration, the view switches to enable a closer look and first-hand interaction, perhaps even requiring a little motion control, whether it's for "restarting a rusted engine, deciphering a coded telephone, or navigating the secrets of an old archive computer." Each challenge is designed to be unique while also "sharing a deeper, interconnected language" and logic that becomes clearer as you "unlock their satisfying and complex machinery." In between, you'll also want to keep an eye out for recorded tapes that shed new light into the world before the cataclym destroyed it.

The complete version of Beyond the Plastic Wall isn't far off, due to launch sometime later this year. In the meantime, however, you can already check out the playable demo on Steam, which is available now to download for Windows and Mac.