Beyond Good & Evil - 20th Anniversary Edition

I went into this one curious rather than nostalgic, and that turned out to be exactly the right lens. Beyond Good & Evil is the kind of game that refuses to sit still on a shelf - it mixes third-person brawling, stealth infiltration, hovercraft racing, wildlife photography, and conspiracy-thriller storytelling into a single eight-or-so-hour package that somehow holds together. You play as Jade, a photojournalist who doubles as a guardian of orphaned children on the mining planet Hillys. She carries a dai-jo fighting staff for melee, a Gyrodisk Glove for ranged attacks and basic switch puzzles, and a camera that doubles as both a story tool and a creature-cataloguing mechanic that rewards exploration with in-game currency. Her companions - uncle Pey'j and later Double H - assist with co-op puzzle prompts and stun attacks, even if the AI has a habit of getting in its own way during busier combat sections. The 20th Anniversary Edition makes a genuine case for being the best version of this game to date. Running at up to 4K and 60fps on PC, the visual upgrade is real - improved textures, lighting, and more expressive character faces in cutscenes - though returning players from the 2011 HD remaster will notice a more measured jump than newcomers expecting a full rebuild. The more meaningful additions are quality-of-life wins: autosave removes the old manual-save-point anxiety that could make stealth sections genuinely punishing, and cross-save support is a welcome modern touch. A new speedrun mode flips the script entirely by disabling saves and adding a permadeath-style challenge, which is a smart addition for the crowd that treats completion as a starting line rather than a finish one. The extras package is where this edition earns genuine goodwill beyond a simple resolution bump. A comprehensive production gallery covers concept art, annotated development videos, and cut content - the kind of behind-the-scenes material that makes it clear real care went into this release, not just a quick cash-in. There is also a new treasure hunt questline seeding lore connections to the long-in-development sequel, Beyond Good & Evil 2, though how much weight that carries depends entirely on whether that sequel ever materialises. On the downside: the game's age shows in specific places. The combat system - Jade locking onto enemies and swinging her staff through a limited combo set - was never the draw, and it still is not. Stealth sections are hit-or-miss; some infiltration levels like the Slaughterhouse feel genuinely tense and labyrinthine, while others rely on instakill detection that reads as cheap by modern standards. The zone-based world structure also means frequent short loading screens that fragment the sense of a living planet. None of it is a dealbreaker, but new players expecting fluidity on par with current action games will need to adjust their expectations going in. What the game does exceptionally well - and has for two decades - is variety. Photography, racing, puzzle-solving, stealth, and light combat rotate often enough that the pace rarely drags over its runtime. Jade herself is an easy character to root for, and the writing has an unpretentious charm that a lot of modern AAA output has traded away for spectacle. If anything, its tighter scope feels like a breath of fresh air against bloated open-world contemporaries.

Alex · Scout Team

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