The work of San Francisco-based studio Monothetic, Beacon is the tale of Freja Akiyama, a mercenary starpilot who crashlands on a sumptuous uncharted planet, but she isn't the person you actually play. Poor old Freja is, in fact, obliterated on impact along with most of her ship. Fortunately, the one piece of equipment left intact is your vessel's cloning pod, which promptly cooks up a brand new Freja to explore the game's procedurally generated environments, fight obscure species and scrape together the parts for a distress beacon.

Die, which should happen pretty often, and you'll be thrust into the boots of another Freja, way back at the crash site. To begin with the clones are identical, each sporting the same acid-yellow puffer jacket and ribbon of silver hair, but every time you respawn, you can plug in gobbets of genetic material from slain insectoids, reptiles and even robots to raise (or lower) your stats and unlock a variety of bizarre mutations.

I'm currently on Freja Mk 9 - the pod's loading screen display keeps a running total - and things are shaping up nicely. My chest has become a hard-wearing slab of chitin, somewhat ruining the cut of my jacket. Two horns have sprouted from my skull, each laced with electrical fibres: they're useless in battle, but I can hack keypads and terminals with them at some cost to my health. I'm faster and tougher than the Frejas who came before, but also clumsier, less capable of landing a critical hit. I'm also less lucky, which is hard to think of as a genetic trait, though the idea that some people are "born lucky" certainly has a foundation in social science. How many iterations of me, exactly, will it take to leave all this behind? Will there be anything of the original Freja left, when I finally get off this rock? Sifting through the wreckage of my ship as Freja Mk 5, I discover a dog-eared photograph of a smiling family - mother, father and daughter. Presumably these are Freja's parents. At this stage, does it even matter?

Read more…