FAR: Lone Sails Review – A Simple & Sombre Pilgrimage (PS5)

FAR: Lone Sails’ core idea is a great one. Having you take care of a machine, your home, creates a powerful sense of attachment. Becoming one with all the bells and whistles, especially when the strength of this home is tested beyond normal means, creates a sense of real stress and peril I haven’t experienced in a while. However, these moments are fleeting within a relatively chilled out game. An experience which for this reviewer was left wanting more. There is more to see and take in here, than there is to do within the world itself. This is about you and your home, for good or ill. Lots of people will enjoy this game. I was left feeling at times content, occasionally frustrated and perhaps disappointed that some aspects couldn’t change this experience from good to great. 

FAR: Lone Sails was developed by Okomotive and published by Mixtvision. It was released on Windows in 2018 and later to PlayStation, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in 2019 as well as Android and iOS in 2020.

FAR: Lone Sails is mostly a chilled out experience and Laura Speller recently reviewed Pine Hearts for the Nintendo Switch, check it out.

Story: Welcome to the Land of the Dead

FAR: Lone Sails has no spoken dialogue. It is a world of show & tell. It is up to the player to parse what has happened to the land you see before you. You are alone in this world – but have a locomotive for company. And this locomotive will guide you through the broken landscape before you. To do so will require you to take care of this machine and your symbiosis is the primary focus of the journey. The stunning backdrops you glide through make up the environmental storytelling.

A dead world. It sort of feels as if you travel through a barren seabed, as you can come across sights such as abandoned shipyards, old family farmsteads. Even the destruction of new development plots, never fully created. However, even as you interact with this world, I appreciated that your focus is your ship. There is nothing I can do for this world and therefore, it’s mainly a surface level understanding of what happened to the desolation of Earth. There is one section near the end showcasing the world’s pioneering ways but that’s it.

I did really enjoy getting to the end of the story, it felt poignant for the journey. But the rest is up to you to think about what happened. It is not the focus of FAR: Lone Sails.

Seeing what has become of the world is interesting but not terrible engaging.

Gameplay: Engaging But Simple – Including Frustration

FAR: Lone Sails can, at times, be great. The simple stretches of road where you have the sail open, the fuel stocked, the engine purring and the music playing, it’s a lovely feeling. There is also the odd story beat which mixes things up. There aren’t enough of these moments and “not enough” was a detriment to my enjoyment of this game.

It is time to say goodbye to your home.

Your Locomotive

The gameplay overall is smooth as was the animations for movement, getting around was great. So, your ride needs constant care. And when you become acclimated to all the buttons and what everything does, it’s a nice management sim. I specifically appreciated having to push in the engine and sail buttons to make the boat come to life. Other buttons do actions such as feed fuel to the engine, lose steam to avoid overheating, move a lift to various levels. It was a good synergy of movement once you got used to it.

Throughout the adventure, your ride also gets certain upgrades, increasing your attachment to the ship and giving you more to do. Acquiring items like a sail to use the wind to your advantage instead of fuel was very welcome. Certain sections were exciting – dealing with thunderstorms required you to put out fires, fix broken items, and the need to keep moving made them tense and enjoyable. I liked these sections as much as the peaceful ones. 

Welcome to the inside of your vessel. You’ll be very acquainted with it by the end.

Fuel

My major gripe with the management side of FAR: Lone Sails. From the beginning you obviously need fuel to be able to keep moving. And through the first stretch of the adventure, especially before you acquire the “Super Sucker”, this is the main problem. You need to manually pick up the fuel, requiring you to stop at EVERY opportunity. It broke the pacing constantly. At times I didn’t think there was enough either, forcing me to rely on wind power to get to the next checkpoint, if I was lucky.

I was always grateful for the sail and the next downward slope. Preserve fuel whenever you can!

Puzzles

Getting your locomotive through the journey will have you enjoying the nice long stretches of road…. Before you come to a stop at the next checkpoint. A gate or bridge needs to be powered or items needed to be put into place to continue. These overall are pleasant distractions, albeit they’re normally on the simple side of pressing certain buttons that are in front of you. There were usually visual clues as well to keep you on track. The best ones were getting your locomotive through bigger areas than yourself.

Overall, FAR: Lone Sails can be completed in under 99 minutes(there’s a trophy for it!) so it’s not a long experience. However, even with the attachment of the locomotive, there isn’t much here to emotionally connect with. There isn’t enough “big” story/gameplay moments to propel you forward. Commanding the boat is enjoyable when all the upgrades are in place, especially dealing with the weather, but the game stops you far too often and the puzzles themselves are not engaging enough.

There were various simple puzzles – here we power the wheel on the left to get across this bog.

Graphics: Beautiful Looking

FAR: Lone Sails is a lovely looking game. It has a good graphical style of a bleak world with yourself wrapped in a red coat for the contrast. A lot of effort naturally went into the look of the locomotive. The camera is also a big component of the game, the zoom feature allowed you to see great shot of the backdrops of the world as you were on the move. The backdrops were great. Seeing massive broken ships, farmland and volcanoes on the horizon, it all looked very cool. 

And don’t forget the gorgeous skylines. Your locomotive gliding along with the starry skies or the red hues of the new dawn, it honestly looked incredible.

The locomotive itself had a decent amount of detail. It had a washed out look to it. Viewing it from outside, seeing the gears, wheels and sails turn and flap all looked clean, while seeing side I always knew where and what things were. This clean but detailed aesthetic was also present within buildings, bridges and backgrounds.

This shot doesn’t do justice to how beautiful the sunrise looked with the windmills in the background.

Music & Sound: Beautiful Music

FAR: Lone Sails sound design was excellent. I particularly liked the sound differential within zooming the camera. How sound was nice and quiet outside and inside beside you, it could be loud, even your footsteps. The locomotive also whirrs, bangs, sputters, wheezes along as you go. Everything else sounded good for sound effects but shout out goes to the weather. Whether it rained or that there was a hailstorm, sound was different outside from inside, it was noticeable to appreciate.

Now the music was amazing. Mostly a combination of stringed guitar and piano melodies, but also saxophone, the music went through a range of moods, from very upbeat and positively jaunty to contemplative, to disturbing vibes dealing with the dangerous weather. There were times I feel the music was so good, that the silence was noticeable in it’s absence. The soundtrack was created by Joel Schoch.

FAR: Lone Sails was played and reviewed on PlayStation 5.