Far: Lone Sails

Man, that was a long way to go just to scare one damn bird.

 

(Also, for a game called Lone Sails, it takes you a while to find the sails.)

 

Having merely skimmed its description, I cringed on discovering my $5 purchase fundamentally a platform-jumping game. I generally despise platformers as a simpleton's definition of "game" bogging down an entire creative medium in Donkey's primitive Kongs, in three buttons and zero thought. The last one I actually liked was the first Trine. On the other hand, platformers also appear the quintessential student project in game design, and more apt to play around with novel aesthetics to dress up that antiquated hopping. There's a lot to be said for art grants.*

Despite my prejudice, I found myself enjoying what ultimately turned out to be equal parts very simple platform jumping, walking simulator and resource management. Load up on fuel cans to gas up your "okomotive" and pay attention to favorable winds, solve some simple sequence/physics puzzles by jumping on buttons, and when push comes to shove... pull. Its brevity leaves little else to say in terms of gameplay. I did manage to die twice, merely by standing in things you really shouldn't stand in, but the only time I really got stumped turned out I'd forgotten I even had a winch for stacking so much junk on its shelf.

Play for the melancholy, barren landscapes. In fact, Far: Lone Sails makes the perfect counterpoint to Ashwalkers with its mountains of interface timesinks passed off as dramatic tension. The only point here when I felt pointlessly stalled for the sake of padding out run time was in trying to figure out whether any of the debris I kept collecting had any utility. Otherwise the lonesome, utterly depopulated landscape rolls past at a satisfying clip and the few special effects are well weighed against overuse. Proof that even bad precepts can be handled well.

 

 

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* Zurich again, two posts in a row. What were the damn odds?