Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition review: still wonderfully inventive

Gaming in 2003 was, well… different. The release of Beyond Good & Evil sums it up perfectly. This was a year in which GTA: Vice City dominated, but there was also room in the charts for SSX 3, Pro Evolution Soccer 3 and Mario Kart. Gamers were open to new ideas, formats and, as it turned out, a game inspired by Nietzsche featuring a lead character, Jade, who’s an investigative reporter, martial artist and super spy, who’s attempting to foil an alien conspiracy whilst taking award-winning photos of wildlife.

The creator of Rayman, Michel Ancel, really put a lot into Beyond Good & Evil’s open world game design, one of Ubisoft’s first, and it’s why this adventure, unlike some released in the PlayStation 2 era, has stood the test of time. (Read more about classic games in our best retro console guide.)

With Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition developer Ubisoft has worked hard to celebrate the aspects of the game that stood out all those years ago, including giving its bold character designs a makeover without ruining the charm of the visual design and world building. Many of the characters have been refined to bring them to life, including Jade’s sidekick Pey’j, a cantankerous, cigar chewing pig, who’s features have been elevated and his mannerisms made more expressive in this classy remaster.

BG&E 20th Anniversary Edition review: of its time

Similarly the game’s environments have been given a visual boost, with buildings and background detail sharper but remaining distinctly chunky and of their time. This remaster delivers on the necessary sense of playing a game how my ageing brain remembers it looking, without ever breaking the illusion that this is a remaster.

The game’s design is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, with Ancel and the 30-person original dev team Magpieing from games of the time, so everything from Zelda to Metal Gear Solid and Grand Theft Auto gets a look-in. But you can see the building blocks of Ubisoft's open world approach, that it's mastered in recent released like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the upcoming Star Wars: Outlaws.

The four ‘dungeons’ Jade investigates are accessed from an open world map raced around in a hovercraft. Each of these mixes in stealth, combat and puzzle-solving ideas and mostly it still all works, if these days feels very basic in execution.

The saving grace is the photography mechanic that rewards Jade for capturing shots of her world’s animals, the rarer the better. Earnings are invested in upgrades to the hovercraft to unlock new areas of the open world. This can feel restrictive; there's a sense the team pulled back from a completely explorable world to handhold the player.

The best aspects of the game are those stages where Ancel shows his knack for planning complex platforming rooms, with some stages feeling like they’ve been plugged directly from Miyamoto’s brain.

Holding everything together is a good story of intrigue with enough plot twists to make M Night Shyamalan double-take. There’s an alien invasion, government corruption, a plucky underground resistance and something happens. It fits broadly into the French comic tradition of building to something cosmic and weird from out of nowhere. And that restrictive open world structure does at least afford room for the game's story to build and the stakes to matter.

Where Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition truly excels is in the wealth of bonus features, concept art, notes, dev diaries and video commentaries that track the original development of the game, and even includes a lot of cut content. It’s a wonderful insight into how games were made in 2003 - the speed of development that led to raw and instinctive design - and perhaps why that time was rich in unusual and popular games.