Summary
Beacon Pinesis a cute, mysterious storytelling adventure that lets you explore relationships, uncover truths, and change the story as you go. You can explore various endings by selecting different Charms at crucial parts in the story, which you collect throughout the game.
If you’re into short, storytelling adventures, you’ll loveBeacon Pines. It only takes about five hours to complete, and you get to play around with different endings to the story while uncovering the shady truths of the town, Beacon Pines.
This game is made by Hiding Spot Games and it originally released in September 2022. In the game, you follow Luka and his friends on adventures in and around town as you try to discover what strange things are happening at the old warehouse. You earn new Charms throughout the game, which are words—like Lavish, Chill, Hide, or Fight—that you can use in certain parts of the story to change the ending.
One of my favorite elements of Beacon Pines is the art style. It looks hand-drawn, right out of a storybook, and the best word I can use to describe it is “enchanting.”
Large, open-world games are exciting because there’s so much to explore, but when a game’s settings are smaller, like they are in Beacon Pines, more attention to detail can be spared. Every artistic element in this game looks intentional, and it’s fun to investigate the little details in every setting.
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I’m also someone who loves a good font, and I really liked the font they chose for the storybook. The easy-to-read font paired with the narrator’s pleasant voice made the moments in between gameplay enjoyable. The narrator reads a little bit of each chapter, to either introduce you to each situation or to signify you’ve reached the end of a storyline. But everything else in the middle of a chapter takes place within the storybook pages of Beacon Pines.
When you’re in the middle of a chapter, talking to people around town as Luka, there’s no spoken dialogue. Instead, each animal just has a unique noise that plays while they’re talking. The speaking noises were a bit annoying, but you kind of tune them out after a while.
Though you play Beacon Pines from Luka’s perspective, you get to know quite a few other characters intimately through conversation. Everyone had such unique, and sometimes big, personalities—despite the game only lasting a short while.
There was one character in particular, named Iggy, who had two vastly different story lines. In one, you felt hatred for him, and in the other, you felt sympathy towards him. Using a different Charm doesn’t just change the ending of the story; it also changes the relationships between Luka and supporting characters.
I mentioned earlier that Charms were essentially just words you can use at specific parts of the story, but here’s a more in depth explainer of the Charms system in Beacon Pines.
While helping Luka investigate the oddities of his town, you discover special golden Charms with unique words engraved on them. Some Charms will come into your inventory naturally as you progress through the game, while other Charms require you to seek them out by exploring your surroundings.
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When the game’s story has a crucial turning point, you’ll be prompted to choose a Charm. Sometimes, you may only have one applicable Charm for that spot in the story, but you can always come back later to try out new Charms you’ve collected.
That said, you can’t use every Charm you collect at each turning point in the story. For example, there are almost 30 Charms in the entire game, but each story turning point might only give you three or four specific Charms to choose from.
You can use The Chronicle to help navigate the story’s turning points and try out new Charms you’ve collected. The Chronicle is an interactive story tree that branches off and grows as you progress through Beacon Pines. I thought there would be more story-branched options than there were, but it ended up feeling like the perfect amount when I finished the game.
When you find a new Charm, you don’t need to redo the parts of the story you’ve already gone through. Instead, you get to see how that Charm plays out versus the one you originally chose, and how it affects the ending of the story. Some Charms resulted in a complete ending to the story, while other Charms allowed you to explore further than you previously were able to.
Some Charms aren’t discovered until much later on, so you’re forced to choose the only Charm you had at the moment, see how it plays out, and eventually come back to that turning point once you’ve discovered new Charms to try.
I loved that finding the Charms was a game in and of itself. It’s not required to find all of the Charms in order to reach the intended ending of the story, but it was fun to see the different possible paths. Looking for new Charms encouraged me to talk to more NPCs and investigate suspicious elements in the world of Beacon Pines.
One of my favorite things about Beacon Pines is that it makes you appreciate how crazy language is. All of the different endings spawned from a single Charm—a single adjective or verb that made Luka act differently, and changed the entire course of events. Anyone who loves storytelling will appreciate the intricacies of Beacon Pines.
If you havean Xbox Game Pass subscription, you can play Beacon Pines for free. If you don’t have an Xbox Game Pass subscription yet, I’d highly recommend it! There are so many great games to choose from, and new games are added on a regular basis. I haveXbox Game Pass Ultimate, which comes with a few extra perks, but you can opt for a less expensive console-only or PC-only subscription.
Otherwise, Beacon Pines retails for $19.99, but it’s often on sale now that it’s been out for a while. You can buy Beacon Pines throughSteam,itch.io, or theNintendo eShop.
Beacon Pines
This game takes storytelling to the next level. It’s a mysterious adventure first and foremost, but with creepy horror elements weaved into it. Explore relationships, change the story, and uncover truths—all in about five hours!
