Beyond Good and Evil™

I've spent time with a lot of mid-tier action-adventure games that mistake variety for depth, so when one actually earns its cult status the honest way, it's worth saying so plainly. Beyond Good and Evil is that game: a compact, genre-mixing adventure from Ubisoft Montpellier that launched in 2003, sold poorly, and has since quietly refused to be forgotten. You play as Jade, a photojournalist and martial artist living on the planet Hillys, which is simultaneously under alien siege and under the thumb of a suspicious military government called the Alpha Section. The setup is pulpy sci-fi conspiracy stuff, but the execution is warmer and stranger than that sounds. Hillys has real texture - beat-up hovercraft, anthropomorphic pig mechanics at the Mammago Garage, a bartender who is literally a bull - and the banter between Jade and her porcine companion Pey'j gives the story a lived-in quality that most games twice its length never manage. The world sits somewhere between fairy-tale whimsy and industrial grit, and the tone holds that balance well for most of the runtime. Gameplay is genuinely varied without feeling scattershot. The core loop alternates between stealth infiltration runs, puzzle-solving, hovercraft traversal and combat, and Jade's photography mechanic - which tasks you with cataloguing Hillys wildlife species in exchange for in-game currency. That last element sounds like padding on paper but actually gives you a reason to slow down and look at the world. Combat relies on Jade's Dai-Jo staff, a gyrodisc launcher, and partner assists; it is simple, sometimes too simple, and critics at launch were right that it never rises above functional. Stealth sections, meanwhile, are plentiful enough to be a genuine sticking point if you dislike the genre - the patrol puzzles repeat their logic across multiple dungeon areas, and some instant-fail detection moments do not hold up well by modern standards. The game is also short, clocking in around ten to twelve hours, and the final third noticeably rushes its plot beats and drops a spaceship that barely gets used, a sign of content that did not survive development. Where the game genuinely excels is atmosphere and pacing in its first two-thirds. The soundtrack by Christophe Heral moves between relaxed and tense with real craft, and the world of Hillys feels coherent in a way that larger, louder open-world games often don't. Boss fights are puzzle-flavored rather than pure damage races, which keeps the mix interesting. The PC version supports high resolutions natively, though widescreen aspect ratios may require a community mod to display correctly, and the mouse-and-keyboard layout is serviceable with remapping - a gamepad remains the more comfortable option if you have one. The honest note for first-time players coming in cold: nostalgia is carrying some of this reputation. Stripped of the warm glow of 2003, the combat is shallow, the stealth is uneven, and the linearity is tighter than the world's personality suggests it should be. Even so, the writing, the art direction, the music, and Jade herself as a protagonist hold up in ways that matter. For a short, story-focused adventure that plays by its own rules, this version of Hillys is still worth a visit.

Alex · Scout Team

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