Lace Mamba A New Beginning review

For decades, environmentalists have told us that mankind’s reckless stripping of the Earth’s resources will lead to the ultimate destruction of our own society. In A New Beginning, this has already happened.

The game opens in the year 2500, where the last remnants of humanity have abandoned the uninhabitable surface to live in underground bunkers. The planet’s depleted atmosphere can no longer protect its surviving inhabitants from a massive solar flare that threatens to wipe them out. With no alternatives left, they turn to unpredictable and untested time travel technology. After a failed landing on an already devastated Earth in 2050, the team’s only survivors are Fay, a young and idealistic radio operator, scientific prodigy Delvin, and Salvador, their driven superior who will stop at nothing to save humanity, regardless of the personal or ethical cost.

However, the game proper opens in the present day, where you take control of Bent Svensson, a retired bio-engineer who’s attempting to while away his twilight years in an isolated cabin in a Norwegian forest. Although the game’s painted backgrounds are beautiful, we weren’t entirely taken by the character art – particularly that of Bent – when all we’d seen were still screenshots. However, brilliant voice acting brought home the character’s world-weariness and produced a genuine sense of pathos as the objects around his home remind him of the sacrifices made in his attempt to engineer a clean fuel source from blue algae.

From there, a flashback brings the plot back to 2050, where you take control of Fay as she tries to contact other surviving time travellers in the ruined future world. Fay’s voice actor puts in a somewhat flat performance, making her emotions at times unconvincing, especially when compared to Bent’s well developed and very well-acted cynicism. Later chapters call for Bent and Fay to team up, exploring lush present-day rain forests in their mission to halt the future environmental catastrophe before it begins and face off against Emilio Indez, a vaguely Bond-villain nuclear power oligarch.