Cheap Thrills: FAR: Lone Sails.

For the most part, my PC gaming preference is for first person shooters such as Fallout or the Halo franchise, with the occasional foray into strategy games like Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, Dawn of War, or Starcraft.  However, there's also a place for more subtle experiences in my library, such as The Long Dark survival game, or The Shore, an unsettling Lovecraftian puzzle game; Real Moon, a moonbase simulation, and most recently, FAR: Lone Sails.

FAR's normal price is $17.49 CAD from Epic Games, but it was on sale for $1.95 when I saw it on the Epic Store page, which made it an affordable gaming gamble - and, as it turned out, a wise choice.

FAR is a standard side-scrolling game, created by award-winning Swiss indie game developer Okomotive and originally released in 2018*.  It's an evocative, thoughtful experience, without dialogue, conflict, or shooting, and it's a quick play, weighing in at about three hours. 

Which is not to say that it's all smooth sailing - no pun intended.  The game features a tiny red-clad pilot** who navigates the decaying remnants of a lost civilization in a steampunk landship, propelled initially by steam and later also by sails - at least, when the wind is blowing in the right direction.  The steam engine is fueled by scavenged objects, and requires a lot of management to maintain power while not overloading the boiler.  

The ship is also equipped with a fire hose and towing winches at both ends, all of which comes into play as the pilot struggles with gates, elevators, and similar barriers left behind by the world that was. As the trip continues, upgrades, large and small, are added to the ship: titanic tattered sails, and a little blowtorch to repair damage to the ship's systems from lightning, hail or collisions. 

But it's not always a challenge. As with all trips, there are periods of quiet introspective travel, as the scenery scrolls past and the wind rustles through the sails - I wish there was some way to have the pilot make a cup of tea and sit on the rooftop gallery during these times.

It's difficult to explain the charm of the game, and I certainly wouldn't say that it's for everyone.  For myself, I would have enjoyed the game almost as much without any of the puzzles that the pilot solves in order to continue their journey, simply sailing across the abandoned world and collecting the little memories left behind: a bell, a ball, a boat, a bear. 

As the trip continued, I found myself wondering how the game would come to an end.  There would be a certain symmetry in having the pilot return to the point where they began, but that also seemed like too simple a conclusion.  I won't spoil the ending for potential players who might be reading this, but it's initially a bit tragic, with a final moment of hope - exactly what the intrepid traveler deserves.  

- Sid 

* There's also a 2022 submarine sequel called Changing Tides for $22.79 CAD. 

** The developer's press kit informs us that the pilot's name is Lone, and that they are female, but I suspect that the casual player is unlikely to dive that deep.

Props.

I recently ran out of new books on my iPhone, and ended up casually re-reading Crusade, a far-future military space opera by David Weber and Steve White*, while I was waiting to have some blood work done.

In Crusade, the Terran Federation is finally at peace, after forming an alliance with their former enemies the catlike Orions.  However, the peace is unexpectedly shattered by an assault on the Federation's borders by mysterious aliens who worship Holy Mother Terra as a religious mecca, and who are determined to free it from the perceived control of the satanic Orions.

The element of surprise allows them to sweep through the network of warp gates linking the myriad star systems that compose the Federation virtually unopposed.  One of the human colonies that they capture is New Hebrides**, but a strong guerilla resistance prevents them from completely securing the planet.  

Frustrated and angered by the continued resistance of a people that should be welcoming them as liberators, two of the alien invaders have the following exchange:

Hold on: "Lantu ran the tip of a letter-opener over the map"?

A letter-opener?

What an odd choice of props!  If the author had chosen a writing stylus, a bayonet, some kind of alien eating utensil, anything else, even a finger, I would have passed over that sentence and never thought about it.  But a letter-opener?

A letter-opener is a very specific item.  Letter-openers posit a myriad of societal elements: a tradition of formalized message delivery; envelopes - specifically sealed envelopes that require confidentiality, backed up by notions of privacy and authority; and the idea of letters themself, for that matter, suggesting a deskbound bureaucratic system that relies on physical notification.  And, given that the aliens exist in a highly technological environment, letters (and letter-openers) are an astonishing anachronism.  

To be fair, the society in question has been contaminated by the arrival of a fugitive Terran colony ship, but why would that contamination extend to such an archaic phenomenon?  Ignoring the future setting for a moment, I suspect that contemporary society contains a lot less letter-openers than it did 50 years ago. 

I realize that the authors may have selected a letter-opener without really thinking about it, which is a shame.  Storytelling is a kind of shared illusion, and sometimes it doesn't take very much to break that illusion - I can't remember the name of the planet that the aliens come from, but it will be a long time before I forget that letter-opener.

- Sid

* It's not the first time that Weber and White have come under scrutiny here.  

** It's actually New New Hebrides, which comes up maybe once along with a statement that everyone just says New Hebrides. 

Artemis II: Plot Twist.

"...Only a minute or so more and man will have his 
first view of the other side of the moon!"

Yes, I know, Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968, but it's been 58 years - things could have changed. 

- Sid

P.S. Some recommended reading: Construction Shack, Clifford D. Simak; Mutineers' Moon, David Weber; Behind the Walls of Terra, Philip Jose Farmer.