Beacon Pines is an adventure game set within a book being featured as part of LudoNarraCon. It’s planned for release later this year and has a demo available now. Beacon Pines is set within a book, with a narrator narrating key events. However, you control the main character, Luka, directly to explore small, diorama-like areas.
It’s an adventure game, but with a twist on the gameplay style due to its book premise. As you investigate certain things or perform certain actions, you’ll gain Charms. Charms are words related to whatever activity you just did. For example, after relaxing while looking around the main character’s house, I got a Charm called “chill.” At key parts of the story called Turning Points, the game will pull out from the action to show you the book and allow you to fill in a blank spot in the sentence with one of the Charms you have.
Not every Charm can be used at every Turning Point, but there are a handful of options you can pick. You can also revisit a Turning Point at any time to make a different choice, and it helpfully lists the available Charms that can be used there, which makes it easy to see if any new options are available.
In the demo playthrough, Luka’s investigation into the creepy events unfolding in the small town of Beacon Pines leads to an early bad ending. However, in the process, you gain a Charm that can be used in an earlier Turning Point. This let me go back to that point to change the sequence of events and avoid the bad ending, continuing the story.
Beacon Pines has an adorable art style and endearing characters, while at the same time presenting a creepy sequence of events that suggest something very bad is at work. While the demo doesn’t show much beyond Luka and his friend investigating a previously-abandoned building to learn it’s now been put to questionable work, there are enough little hints of what might be going on to have me intrigued about the story.
What really caught my attention, though, was the end of the demo. The demo ended on an ominous note that left me very curious about how the different branches in that final choice will turn out. At the same time, it gave me one more Charm that let me go back to that original early ending and change events there. While I couldn’t proceed any further in the demo, the change is significant enough to suggest it will be an entirely different story branch.
I don’t know if Beacon Pines will maintain this style of alternating between branches to progress instead of following a specific branch all the way to different endings, but I suspect it will continue like that, giving you Charms that gradually unlock more options across the various paths. Right now, it holds a lot of promise, so I look forward to seeing what Beacon Pines brings when it launches later this year.
