- DEVELOPER: Okomotive
- PUBLISHER: Assemble Entertainment
- PLATFORMS: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Andorid, iOS
- GENRE: Adventure
- RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2018
- STARTING PRICE: 14,99 €
- REVIEWED VERSION: PC
FAR: Lone Sails is a vehicle adventure game. In a unique vehicle you travel across a dried-out ocean following the tracks of a once thriving civilization. Through an array of roadblocks and through hazardous weather you need to keep your vessel going.
Visuals
FAR: Lone Sails is 3 dimensional but takes the perspective of a side scroller. For 99% of the game you’re moving to the right. The style is charming and pleasant to look at. The lack of detail in some areas was thoughtfully implemented, adding to the feeling of the world being abandoned. The polish has long been worn off of these places, others suffered more of mother nature’s wrath.
Music & Sound Design
It is a crime to talk about this game and ignore the music. Unfortunately, my recording software didn’t capture any sound, so the following clips are not mine, they are borrowed. There is not a single line of spoken dialogue in this game, but the music is so emotionally impactful. From feeling a sense of awe at the scenery around me, to active threats keeping me on the edge of my seat, I felt another level of immersion. There were a couple instances where I forgot to record clips because I was busy trying to survive and actually pressed my foot to the floor like I could press a gas pedal to go faster, with the music really making me feel the intensity of the moment.
Gameplay Mechanics
The gameplay is fairly simple. Your controls are walking left or right, jumping, and picking up and putting down objects. You can play the whole game with two buttons and an analog stick. About 95% of your time will be spent inside this vehicle, so familiarize yourself. You don’t have to be fast like a well-oiled machine to beat this game, but it becomes very satisfying to run from station to station, keeping up with things, while not losing speed. You have this button that starts the engine, and it will become un-pressed over time so you have to come back and press it back in before the engine cuts off. The button above that is the brake, which comes in handy so your ride doesn’t roll away from you while you’re not in it. Also above the go button is the steam release.
If it fills up, something on your ship will catch fire, and we don’t want that. Plus when you hit it when it’s almost full you get a nice little speed boost! Near the rear of the ship is your energy deposit, where you can throw just about anything in and it will add fuel to the ship. Crates will fill it about halfway while barrels fill it entirely. You can throw a chair or lantern in there if you’re desperate or just curious. They don’t add as much fuel but it’s something if you’re in a pinch. Though you’d have to be pretty inefficient with your fuel use to get to that point, throughout the game I never really found myself completely out of resources. On the front and back of your ship, there are winches. No not that kind of wench, a winch.
Then there are some parts of your vehicle that you don’t start out with, but will be added over time. You get sails on top of your ship to help with fuel management or combine it with the engine’s power to zoom real fast. You’re not able to use it everywhere though, some areas are too tight to allow for the sails to be raised and some won’t have any wind blowing. Keep an eye on the flag on the top of your ship to see if you’re able to sail the winds. Later you’ll get the repair module, which comes in handy when you keep crashing into things and need to fix the engine, or the sails if they smack into something because they don’t fold down in time. There’s also the water hose or fire extinguisher to put out fires on your ship that spring up from not letting steam out or too much damage. Sometimes you might use a barrel with what looks like a flame on it to fuel your ship, and yep that’s gonna set something on fire. There are even a couple of puzzles that use the water hose.
Story
Without any kind of narration or clear details given, the story is largely what you make of it through interpretation. So I will share with you all what I think this game is about. At the beginning of the game, your character is at the base of a tree with what appears to be a gravesite. Whether or not someone is actually buried here, we don’t know and that’s besides the point anyway. This moment here below the broken treehouse from childhood at a kind of monument of what we can assume to be a parental figure, sets the tone for how lonely and desolate the world is in this game. Innocence and loved ones lost, all that is left is survival for our character.
Traversing to the right, as you reach the beach you see a small town in the background, surrounding a factory. Oddly similar to company towns you might recognize from United States history. These towns began springing up in the 1880s to provide housing and shopping places for employees who worked the mills, mines, and factories before the automobile became widely available for the average consumer to commute wherever they wanted. So it seems these people have reached a kind of industrial age, which becomes much more solidified when you encounter your vehicle for the first time. A rather large and impressive piece of machinery, as mentioned before capable of turning anything into fuel.
As you drive further, you think you should’ve reached the ocean by now. You walked past beached rowboats just a moment ago. You go further and further, passing more beached boats, and in the background a much larger ship surrounded by boardwalks. So it becomes apparent that the ocean is now almost completely dried up, and you’re chasing the new shoreline.
As you progress, you come across some extreme weather events. A tornado, a vehicle damaging hail storm, among others. This leads me to believe that the Earth, or whatever planet this is, is going through some serious climate change, and the receding ocean is another symptom. The story of this game has already happened, we the players are experiencing it after the fact. There are a few established settlements that pop up every once in a while, seemingly chasing the ever-moving shoreline. It’s possible that this phenomenon took quite a long time, or else they wouldn’t have had time to build permanent homes and factories.
Curiously, the player character starts so far inland if the people depend on the sea for their survival. You don’t come across any natural water sources throughout your journey, and if they can make a device to convert any object into fuel, surely they can turn ocean water drinkable, so outside of the storytelling device they created, why does the game start so far inland? There are large factories much closer to the new shoreline, why couldn’t this ship be built there? There’s no clear answer for this, but if you have a theory please let me know in the comments below.
When you make it to the end of the game, you see many land ships like your own, so it seems that these vehicles weren’t the cause but the solution to the problem. Rewinding a little, we encounter a giant land ship, and when we first start it up it immediately catches fire, and when we add mass amounts of fuel to it, it drains incredibly quickly, so it’s obvious that this design failed, and a new direction had to be taken, i.e. our own vehicle. But if we look at the paintings on the top floor of the big land ship, we see that this was the original design that led to the Big Boy.
So the Big Boy wasn’t a sustainable change, transportation back and forth wasn’t forever sustainable, so society pivoted back to the smaller original design and went after the ocean. You encounter no living beings on land, and with the pile up of vehicles we can assume society fled to live on the sea. At the very end when the screen fades to black, we hear a horn, possibly a ship coming to our character’s rescue. A perfect setup for a cliffhanger or a sequel.
Conclusions
This game was released back in 2018, but a sequel was released in 2022, so we don’t have to be left wondering! I’ll be reviewing Far: Changing Tides at some point, so if you enjoyed this video you can look forward to that one.
Without even a single line of dialogue or narration, this game had me enraptured with the background and level designs, keeping me thinking the whole time. The design of the vehicle, pretty much constantly needing fuel added or a button pushed kept me busy and engaged through the whole game. The game wasn’t padded with unnecessary content or chores, the developers understood this game only needed about 2 hours to get its message across, and keeping it that concise only worked to its benefit.
Review copy provided by the publisher
Credit for borrowed clips:
English (UK) 
Hrvatski