Forever Skies Preview
I don’t remember exactly how we got here, but it’s starting to feel like we are hitting critical mass with survival/crafting games. It’s a genre that has games by developers big and small. Survival mechanics have just about found their way into most modern games. It’s going to take a lot to make one of these familiar titles stand out from the rest. Forever Skies has a great gimmick, and it gets one half of the survival/crafting genre very right.
Rusting Hulks
There’s a story and setting in Forever Skies, but I had more fun just ignoring those parts (weirdly, that’s going to be a theme here). You are on an unrecognizable post-apocalyptic Earth. Your home is a blimp with a little room hanging off of it. As you dive down into ruined skyscrapers and windmills, you’ll scavenge the bits you need to make your flying home really, really cool.
Forever Skies is going for stark beauty, and it really gets there. The crumbling buildings creak ominously, as plastic tumbleweeds blow through the sky. Between all of this are clouds of glowing, possibly irradiated moths. As you’d find in a lot of craft games, it’s sort of a lonely experience. But sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for!
You start with a tiny airship. It can’t do much. At first, you’re limited to a tiny cockpit which doesn’t even work. But then you set up your research table, your 3D printer thing, and some engines and you are on your way. The basic gameplay loop involves landing your craft and searching for resources in the ruins. Then you take those resources back and build a better airship.
Clicking Into Place
The building mechanics is Forever Skies at its best. Parts lock together with a satisfying snap. It could not be easier to turn your single room into a floating fortress. One of your primary methods of collecting resources is to hang out the side of your ship in a gunner seat and laser those weird tumbleweeds right out of the sky. The laser-collector also feels great, with a crunchy control scheme and a satisfying zap.
Building while thousands of feet in the air is a little scary. If you put your engine in a hard to reach place and your run out of fuel, taking a dangerous journey on the surface of your craft is a white-knuckle mission. Eventually, you’ll master catwalks and railings, which will allow you to build farther and farther out from safety. But the threat of falling a zillion feet to your death (or you know, your respawn) adds just the right amount of tension to an otherwise peaceful activity.
Crafting is just one half of Forever Skies. There are also survival mechanics. Unfortunately, this half of the game isn’t nearly as strong as the building. Yet. You have to track hunger, thirst, fatigue, you know the basics. And sure, you can find tainted food and water in the rubble and then clean it on your ship, but desperately searching for a melon as your vision fades to black is frantic in a bad way. The survival meters just give you a ticking clock that distracts from building thoughtfully.
There is also a unique disease mechanic. Eating or drinking unclean food and water can trigger all manor of sci-fi diseases or at least, that’s the idea. In practice, I kept getting the same disease over and over again. I don’t know if it was me or the RNG gods, but I kept contracting a virus that damaged me whenever I looked at the sun. Honestly, I liked that! It provided such a weird restriction that I would angle my ship so I could build with the sun at my back.
Air Traffic Control
Fortunately, as with many such games, Forever Skies includes an easier difficulty that drastically tones down the survival mechanics. Usually, I appreciate a challenge in games like The Long Dark or Sons of the Forest. I imagine the similar mechanics in Forever Skies might feel better after a good deal of balance changes. And this is a game still in early access, so the balance is changing all the time.
In the time since I started writing this preview, Forever Skies announced their roadmap (or rather their “flightmap” as they are calling it. Big items or their list of features to add include co-op, more stuff to build, aerial combat, and farming. That list is reassuring. If Forever Skies launches at full access with major improvements to those four areas, it has the potential to become a genre classic. In the meantime, check your favorite gaming site to keep track of the Forever Skies development process. One day you’ll wake up in an unrecognizable world, but maybe you’ll have a game that will let you take refuge in a skybound home.
***Forever Skies provided by the publisher***
