Hands-on road trip through a chill wasteland
Post apocalypse fiction comes in different shapes and sizes and recently it seems like chill rather thrill wasteland became a thing. 2017 gave us the animated adaption of manga Girls’ Last Tour. It is about 2 girls’ journey through a war torn wasteland yet it’s more delightful than it sounds given the lack of gruesome danger they would have encountered in any other wastelands. 2018 gave us a cinematic platformer without combat titled Far: Lone Sails.
In Far, you play a child, likely a girl as many presume, in red coverall and clock. One day, they just decide to hop on a large land vehicle with sail and head out to a destination not hard to guess if you see the trailer of the sequel subtitled Changing Tides.
Despite being in the same genre as Playdead’s 2 games, Limbo and Inside, Far is actually quite a departure from them. While the boys in Playdead games die dozens of gruesome deaths, the child in Far is never in much of real danger. Even if they leap off from a tall place, their costume would allow they to flow down slowly to safety. The only way to fail in the game is to damage the sailed vehicle beyond repair and the camera would pull far out at this point, leaving the dread of being stranded to your imagination.
Like any left-to-right platformers, Far puts up plenty of obstacles during its 2 to 3 hours course, but what’s unique about it is the sailed and multi-level vehicle itself is a platforming stage on its own, and one needs to drive it more than hands-on.
The second floor houses a fuel tank and pedal, with the button level being fuel storage. The third floor contains a bed, from which the player character wakes up from shall you quit and restart the game, a water hose, a repair tool and hooks on the ceiling for fuel. The vehicle might clash heads-on into obstacles damaged so it needs to repaired to avoid fail state of the game. Damage of different parts is helpfully displayed as life bars.
The fourth floor or top of the vehicle has a sail, when the wind blows the right direction, it can be risen to reduce fuel use. Since there is steam to be vent and occasionally a brake to step on, this titular sail is an auto pilot option and a chance for player to take in the beautiful landscape of this wasteland.
I suppose one cannot make a post apocalypse video game with mechanics and not including resource gathering one of those. In Far, resource gathering is for getting almost any moveable object to put in a fuel. Some are more dangerous than others, as gas tanks would cause fires. You would not want to use those when you are too busy to get the water hose.
The 3 paragraphs directly above might make the game sound like busy work but it really is not. It still just might be the most chilled out wasteland road trip one can take in the form of video game and I recommend it strongly.