My favorite part of a game is getting to do something I’ve never done in a game before. So here I am, standing on the edge of the hot air balloon that serves as my mobile base, using a small crane to lower a cable into the poisonous clouds below, then coiling it back up to see that I I’ve caught a giant moth the size of a seagull.
I’ve never fished for mutated moths while floating in a hot air balloon over a post-apocalyptic Earth. That’s a 10/10 in my book. I look at the 3D printer in the cabin of my hot air balloon and see that I don’t have enough resources to make a cooking pot, so I just shove the giant moth in my mouth and eat it raw. Never did that either. Another 10/10.
Forever airing (opens in new tab) is a first-person survival game set on a devastated earth, where your base is an airship – technically not a hot air balloon, but sue me, I like to use the word hot air balloon. You control the airship from skyscraper to destroyed skyscraper as you collect resources, craft equipment and hunt for food (or moths) and drinkable water. And as you progress, you can make your airbase bigger and fill it with more sci-fi gadgets. Developer Far From Home’s survival game isn’t out yet, with a release window set for later this year, but there’s a playable demo on Steam right now at Next Fest.
As for why the Earth is in such bad shape, our humble planet was devastated by some kind of ecological disaster that left it swallowed by an unrelenting toxic dust storm. Some remnants of humanity passed away for a few centuries, but now you hope to find the cure for a terrible disease, presumably because no solution can be found in space.
I spent most of the demo scavenging for resources, crafting sci-fi tools, and carefully scrambling down narrow walkways. You’ll explore areas built by long-dead humans who paved bridges and platforms on the tops of skyscrapers to stay above the clouds of toxic dust, so you really need to be careful. Everything is rusty and broken, although there are computer terminals you can turn on to learn more about what happened in diary entries. I’m glad to be in yet another apocalypse where people are diligent in keeping personal diaries.
Here’s a tip when exploring the post-apocalyptic Earth: Be careful what you eat. Before I started fishing for moths, I found some melons that looked quite appetizing, but eating them gave me a virus that would damage me looking at the sun. That doesn’t sound too bad – why should I ever have to look at the sun – but in the end I tried pointing my deck extractor (a mounted sci-fi beam that I can use to split objects into resources) at some metal panels on a roof that I couldn’t reach, and wouldn’t you know? The sun was right behind them in the sky. I had to give up. Damn those delicious apocalypse melons.
I had to build a few other useful items in my small airship: I screwed a water purifier to the wall so I could collect the dirty water in satellite dishes, sanitize it, and drink it. I’ve added a storage box to store my spare resources. I printed out an engine in 3D, along with some fuel (3D printing succeeded.) For real well in the post-apocalyptic future). And I made my bug trap and a lure, even though I didn’t really know what I was catching bugs for at the time. Or how big those insects would be.
And then I was gone in my hot air balloon base, flying slowly to a beacon that I could barely make out through the dirty, hazy atmosphere. The flashing light meant another place to land, scavenge more gear, and hopefully have enough resources to fill my food and water meters, and maybe heal myself of the sun damage I do every time I go to. looked at the sky, rose. The locations I visited were all a bit the same, a few different levels of skyscraper with resources scattered here and there. The world around you feels quite dangerous, with howling winds, the occasional driving rain and an eerie green glow in the sky at night.
On my to-do list was to create a new module that would allow me to change the height of my hot air balloon, and promised to take me above the clouds to see more of the world without the dust obscuring everything, but I never managed to build it . The main drawback of the demo is that once you repair, fuel and start piloting your airship for the first time, a timer starts and you only have 20 minutes to play from then on.
That’s not enough time to form strong opinions about Forever Skies – I’m intrigued by the premise and love having a mobile hot air balloon base, but can’t really say I loved it in the demo , because I had only made a few gadgets and visited a few different (but the same) locations. I’m especially sad that I didn’t have enough time to make a cooking pot. I’m sure moths taste better cooked than raw.
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