Developer Far From Home recently announced its debut title, Forever Skies – originally named “Project Oxygen” – and dropped the game’s first teaser trailer. In development for almost two years now, this first-person action survival sci-fi game is inspired by the real-world battle against climate change.
Founded in 2020, Far From Home is an independent game studio based in Wroclaw, Poland, made up of former AA+ developers who worked on titles like Dying Light, Dead Island, C hernobylite, and the Divinity Original Sin series.
Forever Skies puts players in the role of a scientist returning to a ravaged Earth hundreds of years after a global ecological catastrophe has left the planet in ruins. Players will need to discover what caused the disaster and find a cure to a mysterious illness threatening their family. As a last-ditch effort to stave off extinction, humanity built towering skyscrapers to get above the toxic dust. To navigate through the remains of those skyscrapers players will use a high-tech airship that serves as a customizable base of operations.
Along the way, players will search for and analyze items, reverse engineer ancient technology, and hunt for viral pathogens to use as weapons or boost vitals. They will also need to find food and create tools to increase their odds of survival. Eventually, players will descend to the surface to discover a totally new and dangerous ecosystem has evolved without humanity around.
Other games try to avoid taking sides on the climate change debate, but when speaking to IGN Far From Home CEO Andrzej Blumenfeld bluntly stated they created Forever Skies because of the "ongoing indifference" towards global warming, despite the many warnings from scientists . They wanted to show the stark reality that may lie ahead if those warnings continue to be ignored.
"The actual inspiration for how to arrange the game’s world into a thick layer of toxic dust and the skies above has been drawn from various comments of scientists on air quality in Cracow, Poland," Blumenfeld said. "This beautiful, historic city is known for its pollution, regularly competing head-to-head with places such as Beijing, Delhi or Lahore. Apparently, to access breathable air, residents should elevate above 100m...This idea that due to gravity accumulating an increasing amount of particles and toxic gases close to the ground, humanity will have to escape to towers, has been instrumental in designing the game’s premise."
While the teaser looks beautiful and it appears Far From Home has created an intriguing world to explore, it doesn't show any combat. Players should expect to encounter mutated fauna and flora once on the surface, so maybe they're saving the battles for later. Tooling around debris-laden skies in a customizable airship definitely sounds promising, and if they were to throw in some type of air combat, all the better. There's the exploration and resource collecting aspects of No Man's Sky mixed with the mystery and intrigue of The Outer Worlds vibe going on, so if all that comes together... It won't be a bad thing.
There's no firm release date for Forever Skies yet but it's expected to hit Steam as an Early Access Game later this year. Blumenfeld said a next-gen console release will happen, but they have no plans to bring it to prior-gen consoles. "The last two years of development solidified our standpoint that among consoles, next-gen is the only gen." Blumenfeld added that Forever Skies will start as a single-player experience with a co-op mode added later. Currently, they have roughly 30 hours of gameplay finished, with more to come.
Forever Skies is in development for PC and next-gen consoles.
Source: IGN