Endling - Extinction is Forever Review: It's Not Afraid to Hurt You

In a video game climate that bends over to assure you that the cute little creatures you play with can’t be harmed, it was shocking to hear the mother fox’s neck snap. Endling – Extinction is forever. I was running with my trio of kits, trying to escape the murderous clutches of a furrier when he caught me. I struggled as he held me before I heard the crack of the bones as the screen went dark informing me that I had failed as a mother and my cubs would die. And while I thought that was a bit at much, that kind of unshakable take on the reality of surviving in a world ruined by climate change is exactly what the developers went for.

“We wanted to put everything there,” said Javier Romello, CEO of finally‘s developer Herobeat Studios, told The edge. “Of course we avoided adding violence or gore just because, but in the real world things like this happen.”

“It’s ‘extinction is forever’. We don’t try to hide what kind of game we have.”

In Endling – Extinction is forever, you play as a pregnant fox who, after escaping her forest habitat devastated by a rampant wildfire, finds refuge near an area populated by climate refugees. There she gives birth to four cubs, and as their mother it is your job to venture into the devastated landscape in search of food, avoid danger and teach your cubs the skills they need to survive as the last foxes on the planet. .

An encounter with the dreaded furrier

Herobeat games

finally is really good at creating tension, which is extremely satisfying to try to master. Early in the game, one of your cubs is stolen. As the days go by finding food for your remaining cubs, pick up the scent trail of your missing one. Scent trails don’t last forever and force you to follow them as they appear, but in the meantime, babies still need to eat.

Foxes are omnivores and can eat anything from mice and fish to leftover human scraps and berries. But the world you inhabit is a desolate place, and areas where you once found food are drying up. A nice aspect of the game’s realism is that some foods don’t fill your hunger meter very well, reflecting how climate change can cause the food we grow to have less nutritional value. I couldn’t find any food except for a few splashes of berries that barely filled the cubs’ hunger meter before it went dangerously low again.

I had to search further and further from my den, hoping to find something that could keep the cubs full. But I picked up the scent of my missing cub. One of my cubs was starving – if left in that condition too long, it would die. I kept looking for food on the same trail as my cub’s scent and found nothing. By the time I finally reached the end of the trail (trails end and can be picked up again after a certain number of days) and can devote myself to finding food again, it was too late. My starving cub had died.

In a cruel twist of fate, my hunger meter filled up after he died. Not because of something distasteful like cannibalism, but because my other two cubs weren’t as hungry and I now had one less mouth to feed. That’s life for you, honey. In an even worse tummy tuck, my cubs’ bodies didn’t dissolve like dead creatures sometimes do in games to clear up visual clutter. When I revisited that area, his body was still there and as I passed it, mine and my cubs’ tails and ears hung in mourning for our deceased relative.

Romello understands that unhappy realism is not for everyone. “The name itself tells you what kind of game it is,” he said. “It’s ‘extinction is forever’. We’re not trying to hide what kind of game we’ve made.”

Romelo said that finally was designed with three pillars in mind: authenticity, meaning the developers wouldn’t allow Fox mama to do things a Fox wouldn’t; bonding with the cubs – when they are born you can adjust their coat color and facial markings, if they are scared or sad you should hug them to make them feel better; and an environmental message.

“Much of the gameplay was based on [the environmental] pillar, because we wanted the player to feel how the environment would be destroyed by humans.”

“What we’re doing is showing what things are likely to look like in the next 100 years.”

finally tells the wider story of the world in its small moments. As your cubs grow, you’ll be forced from one den to another in a dense forest. As time goes on, people go into that forest and slowly chop it down until it’s nothing more than abandoned tree stumps at the end.

But not everything in the game is designed to hurt your emotions to the maximum. There are friendlier moments. There are people who will sing to you and feed you, and if you play the game right, there is a helpful animal friend who plays a big part in one of the game’s endings that I won’t spoil. But finally is not a hopeful story. There is not a moment at the end when the fox family ends up in a still untouched part of the world where they can live the rest of their lives in peace and comfort.

Sneak past the Scavenger lest he shoot you, leaving your cubs alone in the world.

Herobeat games

“What we’re doing is showing you what things are likely to look like in the next 100 years,” Romello said. “We want everyone to think about that, think about it, make their own decisions and conclusions and see if they can change that.”

As much as that moment between the fox and the furrier repelled me, I had to reason with myself. The furrier is presented as an evil character. He chases you around, ostensibly to catch and skin you, possibly even to eat you. But he, like the many people you meet in ending, just trying to survive, and sometimes survival means something – yes, even the too cute for words fox family – has to die.

I appreciated that the most about finally. I sometimes get annoyed by animal-as-a-proxy games and stories. They are meant to evoke the maximum amount of empathy from the player, as if a human wouldn’t deserve, justify, or provoke the same kind of response. It reminds me too much of the specific form of white supremacy in which my black human life has less value than my dog’s. When I’m out walking my dog ​​and a neighbor will approach him even though he can’t speak, but won’t answer my greeting, is it racism? Probably not on purpose. But damn it feels that way.

The cubs are really cute and you can customize their fur and facial markings.

Herobeat games

It would have been easy for finally to portray all humans as these completely cruel creatures, while upholding the fox family as moral and virtuous. Instead of, finally paints the picture, “nothing is good or bad when survival is at stake.”

“We’ve put a lot of effort into making the refugees, climate refugees, survivors,” Romello said. “They will do everything in their power to continue to survive in this dystopian future.”

So as much as the furrier is an asshole, I can’t blame him. Nor do I blame Herobeat Games for taking a less than hopeful tack with finally. No one has time for the feel-good morality game finally could have been. Shit is bad now.

“I think it’s very important that everyone is aware of what can happen,” Romello said. “It’s up to each of us to decide how we can help save the situation.”

Endling – Extinction is forever is out now on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.