You wish you had a robot best friend

Pack your bags and head on over to the time machine because were going to Australia, in the FUTURE. The game this time is an adventure game called “Beneath a Steel Sky”, and with a name like what you know shit is going to get real. Made back in 1994 by the British developer Revolution Software, one of the people who worked on the team being Dave Gibbons, who lends his talent to the game’s art.

"He drew other stuff besides Watchmen?" Yes. Shut up.

The main character of this adventure is Foster (who is named that for a humorous reason), who lived with a tribe that adopted him out in “The Gap”, the space between the massive cities that cover the rest of Australia. Things are as fine and dandy as living in a garbage heap can be until some helicopters shoot up the place and take you to the City for reasons you don’t know, but the helicopter crashes and you escape. This is where the game begins.

This cant be Australia, where's all of the deadly wild life?

You got all of the typical staples of adventure games here: inventory, point and click movement and puzzle solving. Thankfully when you hover the mouse over something you can interact with its name pops up next to the cursor, helping to negate the problem of pixel hunting. The game has a dark setting where corporations run everything and most of the planet is irradiated and polluted (like the immediate future), but still manages to slip in jokes. And any game that gives you a ROBOT BEST FRIEND cant be that bleak.

Beneath a Steel Sky was well received by reviewers when it came out, and is still considered to be among the best today. If you’re a fan of classic point and click adventures then this should be right up your alley.

Good game to teach you the ins and outs of living in a concrete and metal hellhole

There are multiple versions of the game out there on the internet, so here's a multitude of places to download from
Here
Here (if you use GOG)
Here
And here! (if you want to use ScummVM to run the game)