Beacon Pines (Xbox Series X)
In many Choose Your Own Adventure books, if a choice sends you down the wrong path, it’s usually to a quick bad ending or an alternate route that doesn’t quite wrap up the tale in its totality. These usually negative outcomes are often self-contained regardless, but in the narrative-focused video game Beacon Pines, going down the wrong path is vital to understanding the right one. Presented as a story being written, you will reach junction points where your decisions can send the game down quite a long narrative road only for it to terminate in a finale that doesn’t cover every detail. By going back to the earlier choices and using new options you will eventually get down the right path, but more interestingly every path is right in some way as it helps you better understand certain story details or the personality of some characters despite them never getting to crop up on the route that actually carries you to the credits.
The city of Beacon Pines exists at a crossroads of cozy, creepy, and comedic, the small town having some gorgeous art and lush foliage despite the game’s choice to have things presented like an interactive book illustration. The close-knit town where everyone knows everybody though has recently caught the eye of a large corporation that’s engaging in suspicious activities, the ones who end up investigating it being a trio of 12 year olds. Almost everyone in Beacon Pines is some sort of anthropomorphic mammal, and Luka the deer is the character we follow as he ends up being the one who prods at the mysteries hiding behind the friendly face of the little community. While you will dig into some moments that are eerie, suspenseful, or even heart-breaking, Beacon Pines avoids becoming a horror story and contains far more funny moments than tearjerkers. Luka’s best friend Rolo is an upbeat companion whose love of sci-fi comics has clearly bled into how he perceives the world, but the more level headed Beck can be more wry. The kids in Beacon Pines are perhaps written to be a bit too clever and mature for their age, but at the same time the game does take special time to zero in on the emotional issues of Luka and Beck especially, exploring some reasonable woes for pre-teens like the emotional weight of Luka’s father’s death or how Beck feels unable to fit in as the new kid in town with a bit of a sarcastic personality.
That is one reason that the paths taken in Beacon Pines can feel so vital even if they eventually reach a dead end that doesn’t truly resolve the mysteries of Beacon Pines. A pivotal scene between Luka and Beck that digs deeper into how they deal with their problems is on a branch that ultimately culminates in a bad ending, but when you take a different route, you’ll know these details and they can inform how you view these characters. This can even apply to characters of lesser importance, an alternate outcome to the story giving the game some time to develop them, and even though the game’s true finale can’t resolve the elements that didn’t crop up in its specific timeline, it does at least try to address the fate of those characters who you did come to know in a doomed branch of the story. Playing Beacon Pines does have interactive moments like exploring the town, but mostly your role will be as an observer until a point in the plot emerges where you are asked to pick from a set of Charms you’ve collected. Around town or over the course of the story, Charms can be acquired that represent certain actions or emotions. Some are easy to interpret, if the Tickle Charm comes up as a choice, someone will get tickled, but at other times, even with a sentence with a blank to fill in to prompt you, it’s hard to say what picking a Charm like Strange might do.
Some Charms only have purpose in side activities like one where you make burgers by combining the Charms, but the most important part of the Charm system is there is technically no right choice. There will be one that carries you deeper into the story and one that eventually allows you to view the conclusion to the story that the book’s writer believes is satisfactory, but you need to travel down every narrative route to understand the broader plot and Beacon Pines handles this with incredible expertise. When there’s a junction point like how you’ll confront a bully, escape from a strange figure in a hazmat suit, or even influence the weather, the Charm choices are often designed so you will experience alternate outcomes that eventually provide you the Charm that opens up more opportunities. You will likely see every possible story path and yet rarely does it feel like similar ground is being tread. Instead, you carry an incredible amount of dramatic irony that the game wisely accounts for in its construction. You may know someone in the town’s dark secret and the kids don’t in this particular version of the tale, but Beacon Pines knows you have this information so it will make sure once it is revealed a second time it moves through it quickly or handles it in a way that takes the player to new events to absorb. When you reach a false end the game will open a handy visualization of the narrative branches and you can go back to select a new branch, the game technically letting you do this any time although there’s not much purpose to leave a story route early if you want the complete picture. With the plot in total taking around 6 hours to experience as well you don’t need to keep track of too much information either. Beacon Pines has a wonderful handle on how to lay out its intrigue and feed you the right morsels to keep you hooked even if you can see that soon you’ll have to hop over to another story path and leave behind moments that can milk some effective drama out of the fact that not every action you witness needs to have a permanent impact.
The woman working on the book you’re reading is an interesting element of the story as well, not just working as a guide who helps explain the Charm system and urges you to take different story paths after an incomplete ending. Beacon Pines has moments where it will just have her reading narration like the game is a chapter book, but even in character conversations where they speak in garbled noises that requires dialogue to understand, the narrator speaks clear English as she contributes more narration. She’ll describe a character’s actions or expressions even when the game can sometimes represent these through its beautifully illustrated but sparsely animated characters and settings, and she can really lean into the emotion of the moment as she’ll read things hurriedly in a panicked situation or even put on a haughty affectation when William Kerr, the hyena in charge of the Perennial Harvest corporation, is feeling particularly full of himself. Having expressive character portraits backed up by appropriately read narration and some well composed music to match the mood brings together some moments that can really pull at the player’s heart strings.
Admittedly, your actions in Beacon Pines are to keep the plot progressing rather than having anything you specifically need to deal with. You walk up and talk to characters yourself and make the choice which Charm in particular to pursue at a time, but Beacon Pines is something to mostly be watched and read. It is too interactive to be called a visual novel but you don’t really solve any puzzles so it can’t slot into the point-and-click adventure genre, and the choices you make are purely about which junction to take first before you need to go check out the other one. This doesn’t harm Beacon Pines if you’re only there for a story with a cast of well-realized characters and a town you’ll grow fond of though. You’re a viewer more than a participant, but it is a tale worthy of your attention as it makes sure to drip feed out revelations and raise new questions so that you do start to put together an intriguing bigger picture despite needing to wait until that final Charm choice to get all the details needed for the plot to fully resolve.
THE VERDICT: While narratively structured a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, each choice in Beacon Pines is its own adventure. Before whatever incomplete ending is reached, you’ll uncover vital details about the mystery lurking beneath the town, or you’ll come to know its vulnerable young cast on a more personal level, this all expertly weaved together into the next route you take without feeling like any path is pointless or repeating old info too much. Gorgeous art for characters and environments plus some delightful humor sprinkled in between the suspense and sadness make it easy to appreciate the pacing and necessary narrative detours, the story richer because it can explore incompatible outcomes that aren’t just cheap premature finales. It is more a story to be observed than interacted with, but Beacon Pines’s intriguing story telling methods stitch together into a tale where you’ll be happy to witness it unfold.
And so, I give Beacon Pines for Xbox Series X…
A GREAT rating. So many elements of Beacon Pines hold together wonderfully. Luka has a tragic past that gets examined, but he can smile and joke with his friends too. Beck may feel like an outsider at times, but she adheres to the group quickly so she can contribute her more sarcastic perspective. If the plot goes a certain way, it can delve deeper into specific issues the individual characters have, but even if those narrative branches are almost side stories, they are still feeding you vital exposition and details about the world that then transfer over into another plot where the game knows it needn’t get you up to speed. It’s a remarkable approach to pacing, some of the false ends working as effective finales if the plot had decided to go a certain way, and in some ways that will make the true timeline of events feel perhaps less dramatic and emotional since the depth of the tragic outcomes you might witness elsewhere are surprisingly well constructed. Letting the alternate timelines often play out is certainly an effective story telling device here because of how things were handled, and while perhaps a linear narrative that could roll in every vital character detail might be able to build up an absolutely fulfilling ending, Beacon Pines’s willingness to go down unusual avenues so you know the dangers ahead or can dive deeper into character motivations in ways that would be incongruous certainly do make this methodology fascinating in its own right. You don’t actually use information from other outcomes to influence your actions since the course of events aren’t known to the characters across story branches and perhaps that’s wiser for making them all function as potentially believable plots, but at the same time the most you’ll ever get obstructing progress is a fairly obvious set of riddles when maybe piecing together some clues yourself could have been an interesting way to trigger events.
Beacon Pines does build its revelations well so things fit together, aren’t too easy to see coming, and come out of nowhere. The events eventually hang together because of the various perspectives you’re given, the work Matt Meyer, Brett Calhoun, and Ilse Harting put into crafting a narrative that can fit this format certainly worthy of high praise. Beacon Pines is digestible despite its deliberately fractured narrative whose pieces all eventually come together into a complete experience that can ride emotional highs that don’t feel like betrayals when it is revealed the events are part of a doomed narrative branch. This game is built from every story you witness, and while you don’t exactly choose how this adventure unfolds, the way the plot can split and still form a satisfying narrative makes an already effectively written and paced game world come to life in a fascinating manner.