FAR: Lone Sails

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

.

Review:

FAR: Lone Sail is a Puzzle Platformer that has players playing a small person piloting a large vessel with wheels and a sail, traversing across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. This game was originally released on multiple platforms in 2018 and ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2019.

The presentation here is very good and often even outright beautiful, depicting a bleak and desolate landscape in a really striking way, at first only in black and white with your red-tinted character standing out among the lack of color, but gradually the landscape becomes awash in color, often looking like a painting with massive landscapes in the background and often hulking buildings and other structures. While the graphics here don’t impress on a technical level, this is still a very nice looking game.

These visuals are supplemented by a quiet, mostly somber soundtrack that plays sporadically through the game. This never became something truly moving or catchy in its own right, but still did a good job helping to set the mood. This game’s story is largely told through this mood too, as well as observations of the environment – you’re never outright told what happened to civilization, but you get small glimpses of it from the ruins of the structures that existed before… whatever happened.

The gameplay itself is fairly unique for the genre. Players control an unnamed character who can move around, jump, grab objects, drop objects, and that’s it. To progress, they must interact with various objects and machines through the course of the game, primarily the vessel they’re piloting. This machine has multiple switches and bits you can manipulate, much in the same way players operate the machine in the game Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, but here it’s up to the player to figure out what everything does and how to use it. As this is a large part of the fun of this game, I won’t spoil it here – I’ll just say that the game does a fantastic job of conveying to the player how to work this machine without using any words, and there are always just enough options that you have to think about what to do, but never so many that you feel at a loss for too long. The challenge level here feels juuust about right.

I mainly have two complaints about this game. Firstly, it is extremely short – the game can be completed in roughly 3 hours. On top of that, I personally found the ending to be disappointingly anticlimactic.

While its extremely short length keeps it from making a bigger impact, FAR: Lone Sails is still excellent while it lasts, combining clever game mechanics, just the right level of difficulty, and a superb presentation. Fans of Puzzle-Platformers who don’t mind a “short but sweet” game should definitely give this a try.

tl;dr – FAR: Lone Sails is a Platform-Puzzle game where players control a character who can pilot a large vehicle by interacting with various machines, not least of which is the vehicle itself. The game mechanics and challenge level are fantastic, and the presentation is superb, but the game is too short and the ending is anticlimactic. Still, if you don’t mind a smaller experience, this game is excellent while it lasts.

Grade: B+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}