Beyond Mankind: The Awakening

I wanted to love this one. Brytenwalda came up making Viking Conquest for Mount and Blade: Warband, a mod team turned proper studio, and that kind of scrappy origin story is exactly what I root for. Beyond Mankind: The Awakening carries all of that ambition forward into a first-person action RPG set in a nuclear-winter Earth of 2121, where humanity has retreated to orbit and debates whether the planet is even worth reclaiming. The premise has real weight to it, and the faction conflict between H.O.P.E. and the Colonial Government gestures at the kind of morally complicated sci-fi I genuinely love. You play as HOPE279, a super-soldier grown in a Techno-Womb and loaded with implanted memories from a century prior, which gives the story an eerie, fractured quality right from the prologue. That setup deserves a better game around it. The worldbuilding is the strongest card in the deck. Scattered survivor diaries, frozen cityscapes, mutated megafauna roaming irradiated ruins, and a faction war with no clean answers all point toward something with genuine soul. Character creation ties into DNA and cultural background rather than a standard stat screen, which is a lovely thematic touch. The dialogue system promises kinship, loyalty, and romance meters that shift based on your choices. On paper, this is a small studio swinging far above its weight class. In practice, the execution is where things come apart. Combat is stiff and unsatisfying, guns producing little feedback beyond stock sound effects and delayed ragdolls. The inventory screen is cluttered and unintuitive, cursor targeting on items a regular frustration. Worse, each mission strips your collected gear when it ends, and leveling perks reset between stages too, which guts any sense of RPG progression. The survival mechanics, hunger, thirst, body temperature, sleep, are present but so lightly implemented they register as background noise rather than meaningful systems. Levels are largely linear corridors with sparse detailing, and load times are disproportionately long for the modest technical ask. No autosave means a missed quick-save keybind can cost you real minutes staring at a loading screen twice over. The relationship and dialogue systems that look interesting on the feature list turn out to be mostly cosmetic. Characters you meet and build rapport with often vanish without resolution, leaving threads that lead nowhere. The illusion of meaningful choice is more prominent than the choice itself. That said, the story does keep moving, scene to scene the game rarely stops to breathe, and if you can lean into the lore rather than the mechanics, there are flickers of something genuinely atmospheric here. A small segment of players on Steam found something to connect with in this world, and I understand why, even if the majority walked away unconvinced. Beyond Mankind: The Awakening is the kind of game that makes me a little sad rather than angry. The team clearly cared about the fiction. The Techno-Womb character origin, the frozen Earth aesthetic, the philosophical friction between its factions, all of it points to a story worth telling. What it needed was more time, more budget, and a harder pass at the systems that were meant to carry the player through that story. Right now, the gap between what it wants to be and what it is sits too wide for most players to comfortably cross.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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