Sail away, sail away, sail away.
As game fans, we all believe deeply in going from left to right. If we waste a whole day gaming, and feel like we’ve got nothing done, no one can deny we did at least go from left to right. And if a game’s story is limp and can’t find any import for its platform contrivances, it can at least fall back on the old adage that “it’s the journey (from left to right), not the destination (right)”. Okomotive’s first game was about driving a huge, convoluted truck from left to right. The sheer left-to-right impetus of the whole game was overwhelming. For the follow-up, FAR: Changing Tides, they’ve kept both left and right, but they’ve added down and up, and this will blow your mind.
FAR: Changing Tides is puzzle-flavoured, low-jeopardy exploration in side-scrolling 2.5D. The world of FAR is desolate and ruined. A civilisation, suddenly gone, leaves wreckage of homely communities and steampunky high technology to be explored by your lonesome protagonist. Extreme weather is pushing you from your home, and others have ventured ahead of you, their outcomes bleak. Whereas in FAR: Lone Sails, you geed a massive car rightwards for a faintly nodded-at reason, in FAR: Changing Tides, you will captain a water vessel instead, for an equally vague purpose. Whether you find that kind of storytelling profound or lazy, the imaginative work of the narrative is going to fall to you. There are, however, enough good sets, props and gloriously apt musical cues that if the story isn’t engaging, it’s probably your fault.
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