Go back to Beneath A Steel Sky

Written by: Rik
Date posted: April 12, 2007

Throughout the game, Foster is accompanied by his robot sidekick chum, Joey, and you’ll need to call on him to perform various tasks on your behalf at various points – opening doors, repairing things, venturing into dangerous areas – you know the drill.

Although the concept of a robot sidekick may seem a little bit naff, Joey does actually have the best lines in the game, some of which even manage to raise a faint smirk. Though his personality is allegedly stored on a circuit board, which is transferred to various robotic shells throughout the course of the game, Joey’s character seems to change according to the shell he occupies. He’s at his most entertaining during the game’s early scenes, when the diminutive little can he’s forced to use as a body seems to fill your buddy with scorn and hatred. It makes for some funny lines, though, and it’s worth exhausting all non-plot-specific conversation threads just to see if he comes up with anything good.

Joey also says a ‘naughty word’ during the game – which possibly one of the reasons why it earned a 15 certificate. Mercifully, it’s delivered with pretty good comic timing and doesn’t seem to have been artificially shoehorned into the script in order to make the game seem more ‘grown up’. Which is a pretty good job, really, since the rest of the game is filled with the kind of daft knob gags and infantile innuendo that suggest it’s aimed squarely at those who enjoy looking up words like ‘buttocks’ in the dictionary.