This is Keeping Score, a series about games and their soundtracks. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Astute readers may remember that my partner and I have been enjoying playing detective games together. Specifically, we enjoyed the sublime Return of the Obra Dinn, and The Case of the Golden Idol, both of which offer satisfying detective puzzles to solve that work well for two people playing as a team. I then looked into other, similar games we might play next, and drew up a shortlist. Then I got completely distracted when I saw GOG offering a sale on “detective pixel art games”, and ended up nabbing a couple of titles I’d never heard of before. We decided to try one of them: Between Horizons, by DigiTales Interactive. It casts players as Stella, the young chief of security on board the starship Zephyr, as she investigates a series of crimes.

But the Zephyr isn’t just any starship. It’s a generation ship, a science fiction concept in which a ship undergoes a centuries-long journey to another star, its original crew passing on their duties to their children, and them to their children, and so on. When the ship finally arrives, its crew and passengers will be several generations removed from those who first boarded. Generation ships pop up in science fiction fairly often, but are rarely treated in a more interesting way than “this is a terrible idea” (although there are exceptions). The issue is simple: the original crew may be highly motivated and dedicated to the ship’s mission, but once the kids take over everything falls apart. Nepo babies, amirite?

At least in Between Horizon’s case, launching a generation ship was an act of desperation. Humans have ruined Earth, and the Zephyr is the last hope for humanity’s survival, even though it had to leave most of humanity behind. The game opens 33 years into its journey, as the second generation — which includes Stella, who was born on the ship — are coming of age. It should be no surprise that this is when the serious crimes start.

While the characters certainly qualify as pixel art, the ship interior is actually rendered in 3D. This gives the game a sort of retro-modern look, with characters resembling the sprites used in early 3D games like Doom or Daggerfall, but the ship looking much crisper than the environments of that era. There are no weirdly rotating sprites here, however: everything in Between Horizons is presented from a side-on viewpoint, with Stella jogging left or right as she explores the Zephyr. This mostly works well, since the Zephyr simulates gravity with a rotating habitat ring, so everything is basically laid out along a line that wraps around on itself.

But navigation does get clunky sometimes. Stella must move into or out of the screen at very specific spots in order to climb stairs, for example. And, generally, moving around the ship isn’t that interesting. There’s some decent set design on display, like the bustling hospital ward and the social hub near the residential area, although DigiTales Interactive fall into the common sci-fi trap of making everything blue (and sometimes orange, the only other color that exists). Just because we’re on board a starship doesn’t mean everything has to be harsh fluorescent lighting, metallic blue decor, and glowing blue computer interfaces! Humans actually like colorful things, and if they’re going to spend their entire lives on board a spaceship, I’d imagine they’d decorate a bit.

A bigger issue is that, other than a few incidental people to find and converse with, there’s little benefit to exploring. Far more often we were heading to a specific place to investigate something or talk to someone, and the travel was just tedium. It seems like DigiTales Interactive were at least partially aware of this, since they provided a scroll-able map screen with each location of interest highlighted on it, which players can use for fast travel. But this is a sort of half-hearted fast-travel that only takes Stella to the nearest train station, making her walk the rest of the way.

Then again, if they had let us fast-travel all the way to our destination, we might have missed the cutscenes and scripted events that are supposed to happen en route. These are quite common, especially in the early parts of the game, which we found frustrating. In the opening segments it seemed control was being wrested away from us every other moment for un-skippable dialogues, tutorial pop-ups, or full-blown dramatic scenes complete with camera pans and animated action. To make things worse, the first “case” we got to solve was nothing more than a gussied up logic puzzle.

Fortunately, things open up more later on, and we started to have more fun. Soon Stella had multiple cases on the go at once, and we were free to pursue whatever line of inquiry we wanted. In Between Horizon’s best moments, we felt like real detectives as we looked over our evidence and clues, discussed what information we were missing, and decided where to go or who to talk to next. We spent a lot of time on the evidence screen, which collects pretty much anything that Stella has encountered or talked about: people, places, objects, clues, even certain conversation topics. They all get lumped into the big evidence pile (although it can be sorted by type, thankfully), which acts a bit like the inventory in a traditional point-and-click adventure game, in that Stella can “use” a piece evidence on someone to talk to them about it. But there are no silly-logic, use-the-rubber-chicken-on-the-dog puzzles here. It’s all investigation and deduction, just like real detective work. And when Stella is ready, she must submit one of her pieces of evidence as the solution to her case. Whodunnit? Well, let me pick out a face from the 40-odd people we’ve met…

Choosing a solution to a case can be done at any time, but once selected, there’s no going back. Between Horizons uses an auto-save system to ensure that players’ choices are locked in, and it makes a big deal about these choices determining how the story pans out. Even in casual interactions with other shipmates, there are sometimes dialogue choices with a timer attached, usually related to whether Stella wants to be a stickler for protocol or if she’s willing to bend the rules a bit. Timed choices, of course, aren’t great when trying to play the game collaboratively with someone else, so we were happy to find the menu option to disable the timers. That way we could discuss every choice and make a selection together.

Ultimately, however, we weren’t sure how much these choices actually mattered. There are several different endings — exactly how many is kept secret — but the one we got seemed primarily dictated by whether we’d correctly solved each case, rather than how we comported ourselves when interacting with shipmates. We nailed all of our cases except one (the blunder was mine, not my partner’s), and this locked us into a rather unsatisfying ending in which we had very little influence on the outcome. It was a predictable ending, too, with things going the way they usually do in stories about generation ships. Given the single auto-save the game uses, we couldn’t just go back and try something different to see another ending, either. We’d have to start the whole game over for that.

This seems like a misstep that could have been avoided by taking some inspiration from visual novels. For all its wandering of the ship corridors and gathering of evidence, Between Horizons isn’t that different to a visual novel when it comes to conversations and story scenes: dialogue is shown in text next to a picture of the speaker’s face (which changes expression at appropriate times), and players click through the dialogue and occasionally make a choice. As in visual novels, the choices ostensibly steer the story in different directions and towards many possible endings.

But the majority of visual novels allow players to rewind to any specific point in the tale so they can try out other choices and see what happens. They usually have fast-forward options for dialogue that players have already seen before, too. Designers of visual novels know that the branching story is a big draw, and they make it easy for players to explore it, after they’ve reached an ending for the first time. In Between Horizons, however, not only is dialogue not skippable (that I know of), but we’d have to repeat all the cases, complete with running around the ship to talk to everyone again, just to get back to that one case we (er, I) messed up. We weren’t particularly inclined to do so.

But I did appreciate many things Between Horizons does. Its depiction of a generation ship may not be that original, but it is at least believable. I can see the reasoning behind the societal structure on board the Zephyr — one that prioritizes the mission above all else — just as I can see and understand the problems with it. There are a lot of named characters, and each one has their own unique appearance and face, lending authenticity to the community dynamics on the ship and humanizing the proceedings so they’re not just high-concept science fiction ideas. And as is often the case with science fiction, Between Horizon’s themes are largely a commentary on our current times here on Earth. I forgave DigiTales Interactive for one of the story scenes that interrupted our investigations, because it featured a political speech that clearly and succinctly summarized the way the powerful disrupt our efforts to tackle global crises like climate change and systemic injustice: we are told we must each do our part individually, instead of coming together for collective action, which is the only way to really make a difference. In Between Horizons, humans have already failed at that, but in the real world it’s not too late yet.

We did, however, feel like it was too late for Between Horizons. It was ultimately an unsatisfying story that had too many annoyances and distractions in the way of its core investigating. It was only when writing this post that I discovered that DigiTales Interactive’s CEO somewhat agrees. He wrote a post-mortem about Between Horizon’s development, in which he discusses many of the things I’ve written about above, in the context of an internalized pressure to expand their small team and make something bigger and better than their first game, the more well-received Lacuna. Lo and behold, Lacuna is the other game I picked up in that GOG sale! My partner and I are interested to check it out, since a tighter and more focused detective mystery from the same team sounds pretty good. I’ll be sure to write about it here if and when we get to it.

If you’re curious about Between Horizons, it’s sold on GOG and Steam, and my copy threw in the soundtrack for a few extra bucks. Which brings me to…

The Score:

Between Horizon’s soundtrack was composed by Julian Colbus, who I believe is the very same CEO of DigiTales Interactive who wrote that post-mortem. It consists of 19 tracks that clock in at just under 50 minutes total. Twenty of those minutes are taken up by the six tracks that play while exploring different areas of the Zephyr, while the rest accompany story scenes or special playable sections. While a few of the latter are clearly designed to build tension to support the events unfolding on screen, they never fall into the common soundtrack trap of losing their musical identity when listened to separately. Tracks like “Here’s The Situation” or “Lights Out” rely on rhythmic synthesizers and pulsing beats to keep things exciting while maintaining their groove. Alongside the generally relaxed and mellow compositions for exploring, this makes the entire soundtrack a pleasant listen on its own.

The tracks are keyboard driven: usually piano or electric piano, sometimes a synthesizer lead. The occasional synthesizer chorus or strings, along with some synthesizer beds and bass lines, remind the listener that we’re in space. A few tracks feature a marching snare drum as a motif to match the rigid discipline demanded by the Zephyr’s crew, whereas the music for the civilian population tends towards acoustic piano while stripping back the synthesizers. Generally, however, the arrangements are similar throughout the whole soundtrack, leading to a cohesive sound but leaving little room for standout tracks. It is certainly good music for thinking through cases, though. It tends to be slow, but with a persistent rhythm that provides a gentle drive as players ponder their evidence.

As such, the soundtrack also works nicely as background music for working, or indeed for writing this very post. I love having music on while I do other tasks, so Between Horizon’s score is a welcome addition to my collection, whether its tracks pop up on shuffle or I decide to put the whole thing on while I focus on something. If you’re interested in the soundtrack, it’s an add-on at both GOG and Steam.