Black Beacon is the newest title from publisher Glohow that recently launched on mobile devices. It’s a mythic sci-fi action RPG with a story that sees you travel through time and visit different eras of history to try to prevent catastrophe.
In this world, there are mysterious substances known as beacons that seemingly defy logic — they change size, shape, and texture depending on who’s observing them and how they’re observed. What stays consistent is their abyssal black color (which gives the game its name) and the fact that anomalies accompany them wherever they’re found.
Throughout human history, the phenomena these beacons created have been considered miracles or revelations, causing them to be worshipped as sacred objects. Ancient humans embedded them in obelisks, sealed them under temples, or cast them into stained glass frames.
That’s the background lore, but the story of Black Beacon picks up with you playing the Seer. You’ve been entrusted with the key to the Library of Babel, which is essentially an endless labyrinth that contains all possible permutations of the past, present, and future. You get a vision of a disastrous future, setting you on your time-traveling path to prevent it.
To accomplish that, you’ll need to gather a team of heroes. That starts with Zero and Ereshan, who will join up with you at the beginning of the story. Zero is a mysterious guardian of the Library of Babel who shows little emotion and doesn’t seem to care about worldly events. Ereshan is the granddaughter of the former director of the Library of Babel who was stripped of her inheritance when Zero showed up, leading to loathing that has since cooled.
You’ll have the opportunity to add plenty of other characters to your crew, from the affable Nanna to the intimidating Shamash to the elegant Viola. There’s more than 10 characters available at launch, with more to be added in the future.
You’re able to take three characters into each combat encounter; you only control one at a time, but can switch between them on the fly. Each character’s abilities are on individual cooldowns, so you need to swap them in and out quickly and efficiently to chain their attacks and abilities together in fluid combat.
The main story progresses in chapters that are further broken down into several stages, some of which are purely cutscenes while others are combat stages. Both advance the story forward and include full voice acting.
As you complete stages, you’ll earn rewards that can be used to improve characters or their weapons. Skill books are used to level up characters, and they each have unique abilities you can also level up. Once characters reach a certain level threshold, you’ll need certain items to let them “breakthrough” that threshold and continue gaining levels.
Weapons have a similar system. Each weapon starts with an innate rarity measured in a star level, up to 5 stars. You can level up weapons to a certain threshold, then use items to “breakthrough” that threshold and both power up the weapon and increase its star rating.
You can earn more of the items necessary for character and weapon progression outside of the main story in the Resources mode, which you can select from the main menu. You can choose to focus on items to level up, increase skills, or break through thresholds. Whichever version you choose, you’ll get new combat encounters that provide rewards for completion as well as goals specific to that stage, like completing it within a certain amount of time.
There’s also an EX mode, which basically acts as a tutorial to teach you how to use particular characters and a practice space to get better with them. And if you want to take a break and just hang out with some of the characters in your squad, you can do that too.
Black Beacon is available now for free through the App Store on iOS, Google Play on Android, and through Google Play Games if you prefer to play on a PC client. For more info, you can check out the game’s official website or follow along with the community on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, or Discord.
