FAR: Lone Sails is a 2.5D Puzzle Platformer/Driving Game hybrid, with Environmental Narrative Game-style of essentially wordless storytelling. It was developed by a Swiss studio Okomotive, published by Mixtvision, and released on 17th May, 2018 on PC through Steam. It was then ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on April 2nd, 2019.
The game is set in a dried-out Post Apocalyptic world, where the little nameless girl you control is the last human she knows about. She sets out to explore the world and see if there's anyone else, using a large steam-powered vehicle with an auxiliary sail (apparently called the okomotive) to travel. Thus, you ride the okomotive and maintain its systems up until it hits an obstacle of any kind, at which point your character needs to get out and address the issue on foot, usually through solving an environmental puzzle of some kind.
A sequel called ''FAR: Changing Tides''
was released March 1, 2022.
Tropes present in FAR: Lone Sails:
- After the End: There clearly haven't been any other humans besides your character in at least that area (and almost certainly the whole world) for a very long time.
- Ambiguous Ending: The girl's travel ends on a beach, as there's no way to take the land-bound, half-broken okomotive any further by that point. She lights a beacon on top of a tiny lighthouse, and the camera zooms out. The last you see of the whole scene is night-time, with the beacon still burning, and the girl presumably still there. However, there's also a sound that sounds like a ship's foghorn, and there are sails from the other abandoned landcraft on the beach, implying that others made the same journey before you and were picked up. Though, even if she does get picked up by a ship, you have no idea whatsoever what the remaining human society is like.
- Artistic License – Engineering: The "okomotive" you control is essentially a cut-down version of a steam train locomotive, with the same need to manage fuel, boiler size and steam build-up. On one hand, the size is justified by it no longer needing to pull dozens of wagons behind itself, and there were steam-driven cars and buses of similar or smaller sizes in real life. On the other hand, it is built like a penny-farthing bicycle, with an enormous front wheel (designed like the paddle of early steamships) and small back wheel for balancing it. Given the multi-ton weight of the whole vehicle, that back wheel would be very likely to get stuck in the sand and mud you regularly travel through.
- Beautiful Void: The world you travel is devoid of humanity, consisting of either austere desert or abandoned buildings, standing tall like the artifacts of lost civilization. By that point, that's exactly what they are, with only the birds and the sheep to appreciate them.
- Contrived Coincidence: In the second-final area, there's suddenly a volcanic eruption right as you happen to pass through. You get out in time, but the ash ruins visibility and so the okomotive ends up taking a fall that breaks it in half.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Just the steam-powered engine itself ought to give out a ton of heat and be very uncomfortable to be around, but your character never finds this an issue. Same goes for being close to outright fires, or even passing through the cloud of pyroclastic ash from a straight-up volcanic eruption, something that usually kills people through either heat or asphyxiation.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The game uses the well-known combination of black-and-white visuals with spots of red for the world outside of the machine. It is a bit more colorful inside, with tinges of green around the boiler and the bright cerulean water inside it.
- Once you make it far enough into the game, it dawns, and the world is back to full, if desaturated, color.
- Diesel Punk: While the okomotive is steam powered, the whole setting resembles an early 20th century—interwar era aesthetics typical to Diesel Punk settings.
- Hamster-Wheel Power: There are several instances where your character needs to run inside a gear to get a broken-down technology to work. Once, you need to do this to open the gate of a broken windmill. Then, she has to get her vehicle across a body of water by driving it onto a small ferry, then running inside its paddle.
- Hope Spot: Near the end of the game, things suddenly look up when you drive the okomotive into the truly enormous "land battleship" thing and get it to work. The sheer scale of the suddenly moving thing is exhilarating, and uplifting music chimes in as well. Then, you notice it has the same water gauge as your okomotive, and it quickly runs out, with the engine compartment bursting in flames once it happens. Even after you extinguish the flames, it still soon hits the side of mountain, being unable to go any further.
- After leaving the land battleship, things are looking up. There are signs of other okomotives having come through, your ship is in great shape, and you are probably topped off with fuel. Then the mountain in the distance explodes and the ash cloud comes bearing down on you...
- The very ending of the game has Lone standing on an observation post after lighting a signal fire and looking out towards the sea. Suddenly, a ship horn is heard in the distance.
- Military Mashup Machine: While it may not necessarily be "military", near the end you discover what seems to be a battleship that walks on land through a dozen of enormous, insectoid legs. It's very much Awesome, but Impractical, however, as it only makes a few steps before running out of water and shutting down, with its engine compartment getting set on fire as well.
- No Name Given: While we never learn what the girl's name is in-game, the digital artbook reveals her name to be Lone Henrikkson.
- Parachute Petticoat: The little girl you control can jump off heights safely because of this.
- Posthumous Character: Jan Henrikkson, the creator of the enormous "land battleship", and likely all of the other okomotives, including the one you drive. He's also implied (and confirmed in the digital artbook) to be the father of your character.
- Scenery Gorn: Idle, half-built or slowly crumbling buildings soon become a prominent part of the landscape.
- Water Is Blue: The water inside the machine's boiler is portrayed as a sky-blue liquid. Same goes for the water you spray from the fire hose when needing to put out a fire somewhere. The water in the shallow pools of the outside world matches the sky and the nearby sand, being the same shade of desaturated grey.
Tropes present in FAR: Changing Tides:
- After the End: The world seems to have been wracked with a cataclysmic floods and earthquakes, with the city you start in completely abandoned and in ruins.
- And the Adventure Continues: The ending slides show Toe and Lone loading the wrecked okomotive from the first game onto the boat and departing on the sea.
- Apocalypse How: The world seems to have suffered at least a Class 2 due to various environmental cataclysms, initially looking like it may be a Class 3 until you repair the radio tower and hear lively chatter, implying that there are other humans alive.
- Beautiful Void: You travel through the ruins of human civilizations with nobody but the occasional animal to keep you company.
- City on the Water: One of the plans to survive the natural cataclysms was to construct one such city which would presumably be able to survive the tsunamis and earthquakes that ravaged the surface. While the city itself is later found to be in a good enough condition, it seems that the obscene power requirements did it it, much like the walking city-okomotive from the first game.
- Cool Airship: Your boat becomes this very briefly towards the end of the game via scavenging a sunk vehicle's hot air balloon module/harness. You can even fly for a bit provided you do some intense multitasking.
- Cool Boat: The entire premise of the game is you controlling one. You later get to upgrade it with submarine capabilities.
- Despair Event Horizon: Towards the latter half of the game, a massive earthquake hits and your ship gets pulled away by a powerful current, leaving you stranded and ship-less. Oh, and did we mention that you are in a middle of a frozen wasteland?
- Diesel Punk: Continuing from the first game, the setting adds a major naval element to it.
- Hope Spot: In one of the outposts you find what turns out to be a radio tower, which upon reactivation immediately starts receiving lively chatter from multiple persons, implying that humanity did survive in some capacity.
- At the end of the game you are also MUTUALLY this for Lone from FAR 1 as you both are no longer alone.
- Lighthouse Point: Toe encounters one near the end of the game and activates the light and a huge foghorn mounted on top of it. Cue the camera shift to show a signal fire lit on a nearby shore.
- No Name Given: The boy, like the girl in FAR 1 is never named in-game, but
Word of God states his name is Toe. - Our Founder: The evacuation and reconstruction efforts seem to have been spearheaded by a group of nine people/inventors. You can see their effigies and statues in numerous outposts.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: At the end of your journey you meet the girl (Lone) from the first game on the beach that turns out to be the very same one from the ending of FAR 1.
- Riding into the Sunset: After you meet up with Lone, the girl protagonist from FAR 1 you load her okomotive onto your boat and set sail for parts unknown.
- Scenery Gorn: Like the first game, most of the world is a devastated wasteland strewn with industrial ruins and destroyed nature.
- Scenery Porn: For all of its bleakness, there are a few moments where the open sea reveals a more beautiful side to it, but the crowning moment must be when your ship ascends to the heavens above the giant waterfall towards the end of the game, giving you a stunning view.
- Sequel Hook: There are other humans out there aside from Lone and Toe who depart together with both their vessels in the end.
- Shared Universe: The sequel is set within the same world as FAR 1, at first heavily implied by the technology present but confirmed towards the end when you see boxes in the lighthouse bearing Henrikkson's corporation logo.
- Underground City: One of the plans to survive the natural cataclysms was to construct one city underground. Alas, when you get to it it seems to have been penetrated by water and utterly flooded.
- Wham Shot: The final scene has Toe arrive to his destination to find Lone (a.k.a. the girl from the first game) waiting for him, reveling how the horn heard at the end was Toe ringing the lighthouse.
