Rhetorics of Puppy Love and Death in The Pale Beyond (2023)

This paper offers a close reading of the 2023 survival game The Pale Beyond, examining how it portrays non-human animals, specifically the sled dogs under the care of crew member Ingrid Cordell. Drawing on materialist and posthumanist frameworks, the author argues that the game's treatment of its dogs creates a tension between encouraging a warm human-animal bond and then withdrawing the player's agency to protect the animals. The central claim is that this structure, which forces the dogs' deaths without giving the player any option to intervene, evokes emotional reactions that many players experience as manipulative rather than meaningful.

The analysis situates the game within a broader discussion of how digital games represent animals. Games typically cast non-human animals as enemies, companions, or tools, reinforcing anthropocentric hierarchies. Titles such as The Last Guardian and Stray are presented as counterexamples that attempt to foreground interspecies cooperation or the limits of human perception, though the author notes that Stray sometimes imposes human cognition onto its feline protagonist. The paper proposes that respectful animal representation rests on three traits: individuality, agency, and ephemerality. In The Pale Beyond, these traits come into conflict, since the dogs are given emotional weight and a degree of narrative value yet are denied the power to choose their own fate.

Player responses drawn from online forum comments support the argument, with users describing feelings of alienation and frustration and criticizing the plot's handling of the dogs. The author interprets this dissatisfaction as stemming both from the portrayal of animal death and from a perceived hypocrisy in promising player choice that is later revoked. The study is a qualitative, single-case analysis rather than a broad survey, and it acknowledges that the sensibilities readers bring to such depictions are shifting, meaning current design approaches may later be viewed as controversial.