Between Horizons – A Sci-Fi Detective Adventure

Between Horizons is a great adventure game! It's well-written and the story is interesting. I heartily recommend it to anyone who likes good stories and solving cases. The story explores life aboard a generation-ship in a way that is interesting even to adults with experience of real-world societal concerns. I enjoyed the game a lot! What really makes it shine is that you can solve the puzzles just by using logic and thorough investigation. You don't need to guess what the designer was thinking like in most other adventure games. It feels like you're a detective in a real world, and not in some convoluted, made-up story where you can't progress before you find the one pixel to click or the right, extremely far-fetched item combination. It's also extremely interesting that the story keeps going no matter how successfully (or not) you solve the cases. This also creates replayability. The lack of saving is annoying but you can work around it. Just copy the file lastsave.txt from folder C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\LocalLow\DigiTales Interactive\Between Horizons\steam\<LargeNumber>. I saved a copy before submitting my solution to each case and this worked nicely, also for exploring alternatives without wasting time. Creators, please include free saving in this and future games. I can understand the impulse to leave saving out (to make the decisions more weighty and bla bla). Please get over yourselves. This never works in the real world. The worst part is that a single misclick can waste a lot of time and all of the goodwill the player might have for the developers. You gain nothing by annoying your players. Leaving free save out is like having only a single try at your driver's license examination. If you fail, redo the whole training. Sure, it's more exiting, but it's insane. Games are supposed to be a safe space where you can explore the game world in a low-stakes way. Player time is the most valuable commodity here. NEVER waste it.

7-8 hours when taking your time, and easy to 100% in just a few runs. The setting is interesting and pragmatic, which kept me invested. It was exciting to play a detective game locked in ironman mode while still being forgiving enough to safeguard you from bricking a save. The deductions are a comfortable difficulty that welcome some out of the box thinking without an overwhelming amount to keep track of, and choices that branch the story are few but impactful. While not revolutionary, very well paced and written!

It's not the same as Lacuna and I didn't feel as invested as Lacuna, but it was still pretty good.

I purchased this game at launch, but I wasn't able to play the game until the 1.20 update. It was worth the wait! This definitely scratched my investigator itch. The story is solid, and the puzzles are just hard enough to keep your brain engaged without making your soul enraged. The solutions to each investigation seem obvious in hindsight, but you will have to make a few several solid educated guesses. The game rarely hands you the definitive answer even after you find all the evidence. Just like with Lacuna, it's easy to get invested in the world and the characters. I promise this is worth your time. Just buy it!

In Between Horizons, you take on the roll of Stella, head of security on a colonial starship en route to a planet on a faraway star. You need to find clues and solve cases surrounding apparent sabotage in order to complete your mission and eventually bring humanity to a new world. I found the story in Between Horizons to be pretty good overall, but after a few hours, it becomes quite clear just how dreadful the gameplay is. You'll spend the majority of your time running around the ship, going into each and every room over and over hoping to find the right person to talk to or clue to provide. Sadly, even when you do find the right person, you'll be wading through dozens and dozens of meaningless clues hoping to click on the right one that moves the narrative forward and gives you the next clue. To make matters significantly worse, this game employs quite possibly the worst fast travel system ever invented. The map has roughly 30 different areas you can click on to fast travel to, and yet, you can fast travel to exactly zero of them. Instead of the area you choose, you'll be taken to one of the four nearest train stations, which is often farther away from your destination than where you started from. Why give the option to fast travel somewhere if you can't actually fast travel there? It's just a dumb design decision. Overall, I found Between Horizons to just be frustrating. I started and stopped numerous times and after about 80% of my blind play through; I went to a guide, simply because I couldn't be bothered anymore. There is a decent game here but it was compromised by aimless wandering, trial and error gameplay, and a terrible user interface.

Loved this game, great scifi mystery game. If you're looking for a quick but engaging scifi story this is it.

I liked the demo and bought the game. It gives me The Expanse vibes in the best way <3 The puzzles are right up my alley, not too challenging but not too easy. The fact the game autosaves and you can't roll it back means you have extra weight to making a decision (or you can chicken out like I did and verify your choices with a guide). The music is lovely, and I'm really glad to see a "point and click" detective story with the twist of IN SPACE! I am glad the devs made the game, I'd buy more games with this style and this type of story. On some of the cons: I found the camera movement during transitions and while sprinting induced my motion sickness, and with no setting to slow the camera, I had to drink ginger tea to settle myself before playing. I ran into an issue where the game froze in the middle of dialog (I could access the pause menu to change settings or go back to the title screen, but that's it). I decided to go back to the title screen, hoping the autosaving would have "saved" me. Surprisingly it didn't, and I lost a lot of progress! I'm not sure why it hadn't saved anything up until that point, but maybe something went wrong since I quit to the menu in the middle of dialog, and it had to fall back to the previous checkpoint. I think my workaround for the future will be to exit to the main menu / title screen right before dialog, to "force" the game to save. That way if something goes wrong during the dialog, in theory I shouldn't lose that much progress. All in all, I've been having a good time watching the story unfold.

A gorgeous sci-fi detective game with lots of philosophical and moral questions along the way. So hard to find good sci-fi that doesn't rehash the same thing done by dozens of other games. The puzzles are just hard enough to be challenging without me wanting to pull my hair out which I think strikes a nice balance. Definitely a bit of a hidden gem IMO.

Great stuff! Good story that keeps you engaged - and the actual case solving requires not only figuring out "who to talk to about what", but the actual solution requires connecting things on your own, without them being just presented to you if you "went everywhere and talked with everyone". I enjoyed it thoroughly!

There are not enough scifi adventure games out there, so I was really happy to find this title. I liked the story and the graphics and the writing was pretty smart. The ending... I was ambivalent. There so much more story and depth that could have been explored by using the existing assets, it would have made the game so much better and immersive. The relationships were superficial, so the emotional connection wasn't what it could have been. Yet, it is a game worth playing, and I recommend it. Hopefully next game....

This is another great game in the vein of Lacuna. You're solving a mystery comprised of other, smaller mysteries. The story is wonderfully portrayed, the retro-style artwork is beautiful, and the game is full of memorable characters and moments. I highly recommend both this game and their previous (unrelated) title, Lacuna. 10/10

Cool detective story. But I finished the game in 8hrs, which is OK if you buy it for a corresponding price.

Great, engaging story and gameplay

If you've played Lacuna, the last game from the developer - expect the same and more. It's great. If you haven't - it's a great detective game in an interesting setting. It's fun to wander the ship, find clues and piece together the machinations going on behind the scenes. It has some amount of non-linearity (excluding cases of you failing to solve cases), but the endings are suprisingly varied and grand in scale. Not to mention the vibes - it's tense, but also hopeful, as all good space dramas are. I really hope we'll see more from this universe, or from the developer in general. Can't get enough of the artstyle - it can, at times, be absolutelly stellar

Fantastic follow up to Lacuna. The 2.5D pixel art graphics are my jam, and the story is excellently told. Figure out whatever you'd be willing to pay to watch a great detective movie - then add in however much you'd pay to be the detective. Well worth it.

Never been so insecure before but somehow it worked. Great game

Engaging, fascinating story, which choices that have long term consequences.

I really liked this detective game. Similarly to the studios other game (Lacuna), it breaths a thick sci-fi atmosphere. :) The characters and story are well-written and there's lots of suspense in figuring out what happened and why and where the ship is heading. The gameplay works by collecting evidence and then "handing in" your finished case file and conclusion. Really neat system, however, the story-telling is the main driver of the game.

I really enjoyed Lacuna and to the extent that Between Horizons is its spiritual successor, if not a direct sequel, it not only delivered but exceeded my hopes. The ship and the people in it feel so real, from the little details to the overall layout, it's just such a wonderfully handcrafted lived-in place to spend time and explore. The story itself does what all great video game stories do: blending the "gotta see what happens next" tension of a page-turner with the breathtaking set pieces of a blockbuster film to create the kind of experience you can really only get in a video game. The pixel art and use of mixed 2D + 3D spaces is really beautiful and cool, not gimmicky or distracting but actually helpful and essential to your navigating of the world. I know games like this can seem like an acquired taste but I really hope more people take the time to experience Between Horizons. It's the kind of game that makes you think "they don't make games like this anymore" until you remember that they do, you just have to know where to look.

Absolutely worth the 16$ I spent on it.

It's good. :)