Don't forget, extinction is forever!
Endling-Extinction is Forever is an indie simulation survival game developed by Herobeat Studios and published by HandyGame and released on July 19, 2022 for Steam and consoles.As the last mother fox on Earth, your cubs are depending on you. They need you to help them survive in a merciless world that has been slowly destroyed by humans. It's up to you to help them learn how to survive in this world by finding food, staying safe, and learning how to fight if threatened.
This game uses the following tropes:
- 2.5D: The game has a fully 3D world, but you and your cubs can only move back and forth in a 2D plane.
- Action Commands: Used at various points for such tasks as climbing and digging. Rather memorably, one of the first ones in the game is to give birth.
- Anti-Villain: The man who kidnapped a fox cub only wants to care for his daughter Molly, but she dies before he can sell the cub for medicine, and will reunite it with the mother fox with little resistance if she finds him.
- Apocalypse How: This game is set in a Bad Future, where the entire city is in a regional scale societal disruption bordering on planetary scale multiple species extinction due to human-engineered climate change. By the game's end, it has devolved into a bit of a planetary scale societal collapse in a barren wasteland.
- Bad Future: Humans have destroyed so much of the ecosystem that even red foxes are now critically endangered.
- Bittersweet Ending: The mother fox dies of a gunshot wound, collapsing as she drags herself into the forest surrounding a power plant. Despite that, she found her cubs a safe new home and they have a guardian in the badger they befriended who takes them deeper into the forest where they can't be hurt. That said, it could edge into a Downer Ending depending upon how one interprets the fact the forest is surrounding a fenced-off nuclear power plant, that is shown to be just as broken down as the rest of the human settlements, and the clicking of what sounds like a Geiger counter as the scene fades to black...And even if the fox cubs and badger survive any potential radiation, it doesn't look good for the red fox species as there are only four (at best) left who are all siblings.
- Character Customization: You can select the colors of the fox cubs at the start.
- Determinator: The mother fox will stop at nothing to find her missing cub and find her children a safe new home. Even as she's dying she refuses to stop moving, collapsing and holding her cubs one last time.
- Disappeared Dad: Red foxes are monogamous (more or less) but the cubs' father is gone and presumably deceased by the time of the opening scene.
- Gaia's Lament: In this future, even red foxes are teetering on the brink of extinction.
- Gameplay Ally Immortality: Subverted; the Cubs can die from hunger or by being attacked by owls, but the Human Poachers only go for the Mother Fox and never the cubs.
- Golden Ending: The closest thing to one you'll ever get is to keep all your three cubs alive while finding the fourth one (and saving a mother badger along the way), making sure all four of them survive by the end of the game. Not only that, but you will get all four achievements in one go ("All for One", "Two Peas in a Pod", "Three Little Foxes", and "We Are a Family") if you do so by the game's end.
- Gratuitous Japanese: One sign in the chicken farm you're exploring reads "CHIRPING CH[I]CKEN" and "Certified Quality Products", with some Japanese katakana in between ("フレッシュファーム") which spells out "Fresh Farm".
- Green Aesop: The game shows how humanity's actions in destroying the environment will eventually lead to a desolate wasteland, to the point that at the very least, the red fox is on the brink of extinction..
- Humans Are Bastards: Foxes have been driven to near extinction thanks to humankind's destruction of the world. That said, not all humans are bad, and some are simply trying to survive... except for one Furrier who is seemingly hell-bent on eradicating the fox family.
- Informed Attribute: As bad as things are, it's hard to imagine that this is the last fox on earth. They're an extremely adaptable species that have probably weathered urbanization better than anything.
- In-Universe Game Clock: The game plays out at night with you and your cubs having to go out by night to hunt for food and then returning to your home by sunrise to remain safe. Each in-game night lasts for several minutes.
- Last of His Kind: The mother fox is the last living mother fox on Earth.
- Mama Bear: Or Mama Fox, but you're determined to save your children at all costs, no matter what dangers the game throws at you.
- Multiple Endings: The ending depends on whether or not you kept the cubs alive and whether or not you saved and befriended the mother badger. If you kept only one cub alive by the end of the game, it will be a Sole Survivor that may not make it out on its own, turning it into a Downer Ending.
- Ominous Owl: Owls can be found sleeping on the overworld and must be snuck past. If the Mother Fox fails to do so, it will wake up and try to take off with one of the baby foxes unless the Mother Fox fends them off. It's also notable for being (outside of hunger) one of the few ways that she can lose her children during the game.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: The memories you uncover by scent reveal that the scavenger wants medicine for his daughter Molly's terminal illness and can't afford it, until the furrier makes a deal that if he can kill the mother fox (using one of her cubs as bait), he can sell her fur coat and the cub for enough money to buy medicine for Molly. Although the scavenger tries and fails to kill the fox, Molly, in contrast, offers kindness to her and her cubs by offering them food. We are then shown through more pics that eventually the scavenger calls off the deal thanks to his daughter's kindness and tries to find another way to save her. But after Molly eventually succumbs to her illness, and the mother fox comforts him, the scavenger becomes more determined to protect the remnants of a dying wildlife. Unfortunately, he is later found dead with a hatchet embedded in his chest and his gun missing, implied to be the work of the furrier who didn't take kindly to the scavenger's resignation.
- Shout-Out: The three achievements you obtain for finding all traces of the missing cub in each location bears Rick Astley's song to mind (specifically, "Never Gonna Give You Up").
- The "Chicken Dinner" achievement you get when you kill one chicken and feed it to your cubs is a shout-out to the meme that spawned from the 2008 film 21.
- The wasteland that the mother fox and her cub(s) are moving away from along with the badger (who has lost her son if you helped them earlier) and some humanity remaining, kinda brings to mind the death parade of the dinosaurs in the "Rite of Spring" segment of Fantasia.
- Silence Is Golden: There is not a single line of dialogue nor any overarching BGM in this game.
- Sole Survivor: If you let all the cubs die except one, it will be left alone without a mother at the end of the game, with almost no one to care for it.
- Stealth-Based Mission: One of the game's main elements is to avoid being confronted by humans while traveling to find a new home. This involves travelling by night and hiding in front of objects to avoid being exposed by light.
- Truth in Television: This game shows that the humans' actions really are causing mass destruction of the environment, though it's exaggerated to make a point (red foxes are nowhere near extinction in the real world, most obviously).
- We Cannot Go On Without You: If the Mother Fox dies or is killed at any point of the game except the plot-mandated ending, it results in a game over.
