FAR: Changing Tides review

Zen and the art of submarine maintenance

"Little kid in an oppressive environment" has become quite the trope for highly atmospheric and minimalistic puzzle platformers. While in games like Little Nightmares and Limbo, there's a stressful feeling of danger, the FAR games are very cathartic. You can't die, there are no monsters out to get you and the game is completely devoid of violence. Think about that, a game in which you don't kill a single creature.

But there are not many creatures to begin with. The world is almost devoid of life. There are a few animals, fish and birds, but you don't find another living anthropoid being. Until the end, that is. The palette for this world is equally desolate, with a lot of grey and black industrial steel, rust or wintery white. There's no explanation for what happened, we can only infer, through environmental storytelling, that a sort of advanced steampunk-ish society has collapsed for some reason.

While the world is bleak, the interior of your submarine (well, it's not exactly a submarine from the start, you have to upgrade it) feels very cozy, much like the train in the first game.

The gameplay consists of controlling and maintaining this submarine and solving environmental puzzles to allow the machine to sail further. Most of the puzzles are fairly easy, but I had trouble with a couple of them. The alternation of puzzles and sailing keeps you playing the game or coming back to it, It's fantastic that a game with literally no action is not boring at all.

Some high notes produced by strings, accordions, or even a soprano, accompany success to some of the more difficult puzzles, further reinforcing your sense of achievement by adding a bit of emotion to the otherwise desolate game. After some of these puzzles, there are long periods of sailing without anything else happening. Still, there is something very soothing about these, so not much of a problem and I never felt bored. It would be great, though, had the game allowed you to save and not go through these again if you quit. I suspect a lot of people will finish the game in one or two sessions, so not a problem for them. Also, as another somewhat negative point, the controls can be a bit overlapping when controlling and maintaining the vehicle.

The ending was a bit surprising and highly emotional. It is quite an achievement, considering no words are ever uttered in the game. But you need to have played the first game for it to have a full impact.

I've played the game on Game Pass, and I don't see any reason to not try it out if you are subscribed. If you ask me, you have to play it even if you don't have Game Pass.