Beautiful Desolation

This amazing game is a must play!

Story is deep rich and worth exploring to its full potential. You wont get bored, with this beautiful story game!! One of my all time favorite point clicker games. I also would like to point out how unique the art design is on the world and each individual characters.. Great detailed has been added to the different choices you have to make and outcomes that are detrimental to the story as a whole.

A truly unique game that gives Disco Elysium and/or Planescape:Torment vides at times. Admittedly, I used a guide and because the game world is so large, I assume it would be very frustrating without a guide. Despite using a guide, I was intrigued the entire time due to the unique setting and characters you encounter along the way. This game certainly has a unique vibe.

As a big fan of the previous games (Stasis and Stasis: Bone Totem), I knew the studio was South African, but the distinct flavour of this game was an unexpected delight.
While the puzzles aren't the most challenging, for a narrative game such as this I honestly prefer the steady progression via storytelling over obscure hidden logic.

I am really into this Type of Games, so jumped in with high Expectations just because of how beautyfully it is designed, but sadly my Gameplay kept mostly unorganized at first due to not getting any Story-Background in the Beginning and lots of the Fetch-Quest are not very good described, which makes it more a Puzzle- and Search-Game^^
May alter this in some Points after a while in, but cant say for now that it catched me somewhere besides its appearance.. 🍀

It's a nice indie attempt at the classics like Shadowrun and Fallout.
I didn't feel particularly grabbed by the story. It's an ok game though and I don't regret supporting the developers.

A massive recommendation from me. My favorite game I've played in 2026, so far.
I've enjoyed THE BROTHERHOOD's three games in the STASIS series. I went into Beautiful Desolation expecting to also enjoy it. In some ways I prefer it. The scope is much larger, which allowed for imagination to run wild.
The game lives up to its name, with a post-apocalyptic wasteland that nevertheless impresses with its beauty. The artwork is stunning and the variety of landscapes is astonishing.
Most of the land is desolate but the world is full of life. There are several factions to meet and an incredible number of bizarre characters that are all striking to look at and interesting to talk to. Their appearances, personalities and voices are all unique and memorable. The voice acting is very fun, with a limited cast of actors and actresses putting on all kinds of accents. The South African man doing an Indian accent was delightfully absurd!
Just a week or two ago, I played Trash Goblin. I played the Epic Games Store version I picked up on a giveaway, so I haven't reviewed it and I have to resist talking about it too much. It also tried having a bunch of unique characters. But the characters were based on being special snowflakes and having "quirks" rather than feeling like inhabitants of a lived-in world. They all sounded fundamentally the same to me. There were no characters with any edge. Their conflicts were all superficial. It felt fake.
Beautiful Desolation's characters were my favorite part of the game. The main thing keeping me progressing was wanting to find new creatures, beings, robots or people to converse with. The character portraits have strange faces and simple animations, reminiscent of old Blizzard games or the CRPG Fallout games.
The gameplay itself pales in comparison to the dialogue and learning about the rivalries and histories of the South African post-apocalypse. It's all about finding objects and there are less than five actual puzzles. Some reviewers have reasonably called the gameplay "fetch quests."
I can truthfully say that I completed the game without ever looking at a guide. I saw a review saying he had to use the developer's game guide, but this is not a difficult game to progress through. I just was thorough in searching all the areas and I paid attention to all the dialogues. The world map helpfully pulses green circles on areas where there's an active interaction or conversation. There were only two times I got legitimately stuck.
The first was when I didn't notice an interaction I did had disabled an NPC I needed to talk to. The other was near the end of the game, but instead of looking up a guide, I thought about it for a while and remembered an interaction from early in the game that seemed like it could help. Ironically, it was in the same location where'd I'd got stuck in the early-game. That interaction was still available and turned out to be the solution to my late-game problem.
Unlike STASIS, there's no way to fail or die in Beautiful Desolation. STASIS was incredibly tense to play through, and I wasn't prepared for how less stressful Beautiful Desolation would be. I kept expecting to read a descriptive tooltip talking about some organic matter "sloughing off," but despite plenty of macabre sights and sounds, nothing that gross is found in the game.
Once I felt like I was nearing the final stretch of the game, I went back to The Bulwark to play the combat arena Pokémon battle minigame. I didn't enjoy this game mode and was bored of it after the very first match, and there are FIVE to play. I don't know how seriously I'm meant to take the minigame. When constructing a team, I couldn't see what abilities my units had, or the abilities of my opponent's units, until in a match.
The combat system has no damage over time, no combos, the few area of effect abilities did pathetic amounts of damage, and there are no status effects. I relied on the Fley units that can deal a guaranteed 10 damage for 6 action points. The strategy is to field high health units and to kill enemy units one by one, since the number of action points gained each rounds equals the number of living units on each team.
The achievement for beating all five matches is extremely rare, so clearly most people who completed the game didn't bother with it. There's another way to get the key item rewarded for clearing the arena, so it's actually optional.
I thought the game's ending was anti-climactic but it gets the job done of suggesting that the game is ripe for multiple playthroughs. Indeed, there are choices throughout the game that allowed me to determine the rise and fall of the factions. I just went for "normal" choices that any sane person would make. There are "insane" choices available that were obviously something a person would only try on a subsequent playthrough.
I won't be replaying Beautiful Desolation but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. This is a game with that rare and intangible quality called, SOUL. It's not just quirks and strangeness on display, here. There's a depth of creativity and earnestness that allowed me to feel real emotions as I played the game.
I've now played all of THE BROTHERHOOD's games and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

What an un-usual story, it's has an apoloytic theme and an engaging story with beautiful graphics.
It's like all of the Brotherhood games , bordering on the horror side of things, but that said as someone not into horrors I find the Sci Fi element keeps me engaged.
The only downside is as the story is quite complex, I do find myself running around trying to work out what to do, I have found with this game that it is best to explore the location and if you can't work out what to do , move onto to another location and explore until you find something that can be used in one of the other locations.
Overall it's an excellent game and I certainly will be playing it until i complete it.