Developer: Okomotive
Players: 1
Games vs art, discuss! Gameplay challenge vs the journey, argue! Actually, let's not bother. Just enjoy Far: Lone Sails for what it is, a placid journey through an sadness-tinged, epic post-industrial, landscape on board the good ship somethingorother.
Far: Lone Sails sees a little girl, apparently the daughter of an inventor, taking her steam engine cum landcrawler across a desert landscape, a dried-up sea-bed from some ecological nightmare, full of shattered industrial relics.
From the simple, like fractured beach boardwalks and groynes, floatsam and the wrecks of old piers to beached giant cargo vessels and submarines, the loom into view, littering the background and blocking the foreground, with a neat zoom feature bringing more of the land into view as the vessel picks up speed.
The engine mechanics, unexplained. The plot, just follow the story. The gameplay? Modest puzzle challenges at regular intervals break up the journey, with Lone Sails making good use of the colour red for any interactive points. They stands out against the muted, neutral tones and shades of the drifting sands, scudding clouds and dark storms ahead.
All the key action features of the landcrawler are red, the loader for the steam engine, the accelerator and steam release buttons that provides a nice boost, and the firefighting kit for when things go wrong. Lighting clues and odd arrow will get the little girl's craft up and moving, and around the land, crates of "water" can be found to keep refueling the vessel and moving onto the next interaction.
Sails can be added into the journey to help turn the vessel into a wind racer, while it has a winch to remove some obstacles, and the chokepoints in the game require only a little out-and-about exploring. There are some hints as to what happened to the world in the few buildings or machines you explore, but its really up to you to build your own internal monologue for the backstory, as the game isn't telling.
A couple of hours long, you might want to go back through it to see if you can make any further sense of things, but it looks like there's no multiple endings or secrets to uncover, so enjoy it the first time, with the gorgeous ambient soundtrack and the overall sense of timelessness that Far: Lone Sails presents.
There's lots of questions you might ask along the way, but for me this was such a sweet voyage that I didn't want to ruin it by over-thinking, just enjoying it for what Far: Lone Sails is.
Score 4/5 (review code provided)
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