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{{quote|''"Marvellous! I get kidnapped, nearly killed in a 'copter crash, hunted by professional thugs... and I'm stuck with a ROBOT in a SULK!''|'''Robert Foster''', exchanging angry words with his belligerent robot Joey.}}
 
''Beneath A Steel Sky'' is a British [[Point and Click]] video game, released for PC DOS and [[Amiga]] platforms in 1994. It came in two basic versions for both of those platforms: a text-heavy disk-based affair with minimal sound effects and a more lavish [[Compact Disc|CD-ROM]] production with full music and speech, the latter of which was unusual considering the limitations of most computer systems of the era. The artwork and general style was partially created by [[Watchmen (Comic Bookcomics)|Dave Gibbons]], whose illustrations grace the [[Compact Disc|PC CD-ROM]] version's introduction video, with the subtitles using comic-book style [[Emphasise Everything|EMPHASIS]] on [[Bold Inflation|KEYWORDS]].
 
The player controls a character called Rob Foster. Rob was rescued by a tribe of bandits as a child after he was found as the only surviving member of a helicopter crash, on which his mother was also a passenger. He is raised by the tribe and comes to look upon them as his family, learning skills such as hunting and building himself a robot from discarded scraps found in local garbage dumps. They inhabit a barren wasteland known as "The Gap", a deserted area that was once part of the Australian outback, a harsh place where daily survival is a struggle.
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* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: Joey can rarely say a line without biting sarcasm and critique of Rob's incompetence. He provides a lot of the humour which makes the game fun to play; try getting him to analyze inventory items.
* [[Do Androids Dream?]]: The further into the game you get, the more this question looms over you.
* [[Dubtitle]] / [[Fun Withwith Subtitles]]: Due more to lack of attention to detail than anything else, often the spoken dialogue and written dialogue are different. Sometimes these are regional variations, like changing "spanner" to "wrench", but every so often the line is completely different, although the meaning is the same. This provides an inadvertent source of humour.
* [[Easter Egg]]: On the Amiga version, the programmers hid a little information in the main executable file. It was a short note on how hard it was to get the game running with only 1MB of RAM, written in "Olde Worlde" style English.
* [[Establishing Character Moment]]: [[Fun Withwith Acronyms|BASS]] goes out of its way to provide motivations for the lead character and tells us what sort of person he is quite quickly. Though [[Backstory|backstories]] and long [[Cutscene|cutscenes]] are commonplace now, this was a rare thing in 1994.
* [[Foreshadowing]]: All over the place. Seemingly throwaway lines and scenes can give clues to what happens later, in terms of both plot and puzzle-solving.
* [[Freud Was Right]]: There's plenty of dialogue that doubles as innuendo.
{{quote| '''Lamb:''' Pipes are the arteries of this mighty ERECTION, the VEINS through which its LIFEBLOOD pumps...}}
** Also, the video tape "Pussies On Parade". While earlier Lamb was referring to his cat, it can bring some hilariously inappropriate connotations. Deliberate? Maybe.
* [[Fun Withwith Acronyms]]: LINC, which actually stands for '''L'''ogical '''I'''nter-'''N'''eural '''C'''onnection.
* [[Gainax Ending]]: No-one could have predicted the conclusion. Very unusual, no easy answers.
* [[Game Breaking Bug]]: Both PC versions and the Amiga disk version, and all the subsequent ScummVM ports of them, are stable. But the CD32 version is riddled with problems... the code system used to save the game wasn't tested, and some codes will freeze the game as they fail to load certain key files the game needs to run. Not to mention the way the music ducks in and out unevenly on the volume slider, how the speech takes ages to load due to the slow CD drive and poor use of buffering or that sometimes cuts half the music while it plays, and several other things. Which is a shame, as it could have been the best version if more time had been spent fixing the flaws.
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* [[Grand Theft Me]]: A chilling, non-human version. To say any more would ruin the finale.
* [[Gone Horribly Wrong]]: Doesn't it always?
* [[Hoist Byby His Own Petard]]: This happened to LINC's creator.
* [[Hot Scientist]]: Anita. She's not quite a scientist but she's tech savvy and fits the description to perfection.
* [[Impossibly Cool Clothes]]: Rob's quasi-futuristic outfit, though amusingly throughout the game people poke fun at it and him.
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'''Rob''': And cut that out! }}
* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism]]: In a world full of cynics this is an interesting proposition; who can be ''less'' idealistic?
* [[Snarky Non -Human Sidekick]]: Joey, the wise-cracking back-talking robot who enjoys criticizing things and one day dreams of using his welding tool to kill people. Seriously, this is [[Futurama|Bender]] five years before the fact.
* [[Stay in Thethe Kitchen]]: Lamb's attitude to women is terrible. He treats Anita like a slave, and he can get away with it because of his status.
* [[Stock British Phrases]]: Used in a savvy way, mostly. Including the time when Anita tells Rob that his idiom about getting a Schreibmann Port is ''actually a description of the procedure itself''.
* [[Stuffed Into the Fridge]]: {{spoiler|Anita survives until Robert visits a locker in the church, where he finds her radiation burned remains stuffed into a locker. It's as if opening the locker causes her to die and teleports her remains there.}}
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