FAR: Changing Tides - The Tragedy of a Lost Child
I wrote about FAR: Lone Sails in 2019. It feels like ages ago, in large part thanks to the endless pandemic we have been embattled with since 2020. Lone Sails hit me like a freight train, asking me to confront not just my long running habit of playing games where the active verbs are shoot, blow up, and kill, but also demanding I deal with the untimely death of my grandfather, nearly a year after. I have written about games for a decade, and in large part due to the way games like FAR: Lone Sails and mobile darling Florence, I have found a new way to approach games. I often tell people, in conversations we have, that I don’t generally have the access to release reviews with embargo dates. As a small journalist I rarely get that kind of early code. So instead I lean into reviewing games from the perspective of how they impact me, rather than just examining whether or not you should buy this thing.
FAR: Changing Tides, the follow-up/sister title from the small team at Okomotive, is another one of those titles that I found deep resonance with. It seems, somehow, that the Zurich-based indie studio managed to bottle lightning twice.
FAR: Changing Tides, like its sister title, is about loss. However, where Lone Sails places you at the tombstone of a passed loved one, Changing Tides casts your character into the water at the very first moment. The world around you is similarly broken, flotsam and jetsam littering the surface around you, flooded cities and structures in the immediate and far distance. You quickly come across your craft, a familiarly bulky, sturdily built ship. Inside you are slowly introduced to the mechanics of locomotion (perhaps Okomotion), as you progress. Sailing before burning coal to turn oars. This Okomotive is slightly different from the one you command in Lone Sails, where there was a steam valve on the first, there is a header on this motor that slowly gathers heat. Where the hose before was used for putting out fires, here it is used for cooling that header to keep from overheating. Later in the game you use that same hose to control depth. All tutorialized contextually. You learn new mechanics when you must.
Okomotive’s first title used this brand of tutorialization extremely well, and they continue the process here, giving the player the agency to learn themselves and therefore drawing them closer to the inner workings of their vessel. This closeness, this familiarity, works twofold. While you become acquainted with the mechanics you will use to progress forward, you also start to feel attached to your craft. I spoke with a couple devs from Okomotive a little more than a month ago. We chatted mostly about Lone Sails, getting to speak only briefly about Changing Tides as it hadn’t released yet, but in our conversation about the first game Phil Stern and Fabio Baumgartner reiterated their design hypothesis. They set out designing the first game hoping to create the Okomotive as a character. Rather than giving you a traditional companion, the vehicle itself would take on the mantle of partner. It moves and breathes just the same, demanding constant care and maintenance. A sort of mechanical pet, even friend, that you are constantly feeding, watering, and cleaning. In half the time, Changing Tides draws you into the same relationship.
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Over the last two years the world has had to endure. It’s something that we’ve all had to deal with, despite some acting as if they are dealing with an altogether different struggle. In reality we have all been burdened by loneliness, absence, and strangeness in some way. The way we work has rapidly changed. In some cases that change is on its way to rectifying itself as workplaces start to return to normalcy, but for many those changes are going to remain, an ever shifting normal. I remember, in the first few weeks of lockdown, I wasn’t particularly worried about the isolation. My friends and I had a consistent group that played games in the evening, I had recently transitioned to working on my website and streams full time, and my wife’s employer had been proactive in allowing her to work from home. If anything it was a welcome change from working the inconsistent hours and confronting the endless troubles of retail employment. I no longer had to deal with stifling bureaucracy or entitled customers. It was hard to see the negative impact initially.
I do distinctly remember acknowledging to myself that this pandemic likely wouldn’t be “over by Easter.” But I'll be honest with you, I was in no way expecting it to extend as long as it has. The impacts were subtle at first. I remember meeting one of my neighbors for the first time and standing outside, looking at his mouth as he spoke, understanding what he was saying but being unable to decide what to do with my hands as I stood on my front sidewalk. I wobbled uncomfortably, picking up my feet and placing them immediately back down. I remember the awkward nature of planning family holidays and visits after my son was born. A full year past that time, looking back is like staring into a bit of a spiderwebbed mirror, trying to place all the pieces correctly. The empty streets, the hollow holidays, the quiet days and quieter nights, the plain and visible, wandering fear. All shards of a past too close to forget but too near to exhale.
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Where FAR: Lone Sails told a story that felt like carrying on despite loss, FAR: Changing Tides plays out far more desperately. The tone is shifted, marginally, drawing the player into a struggle to just get somewhere safe. The world here is just as dangerous, washing you away as a dam bursts, washing your ship away and damaging its hull. Or carrying it away from you completely, forcing you to reckon with the questions that follow: Will I ever find it again? Am I truly alone now? From the onset of your journey you constantly wonder what happened, only this time that question extends to the player character. In Lone Sails the image of a child, taking care of an ailing parent is easy to conjure. The motivation to shove off after their parent passes is easy to quantify. It is acceptance of the situation and heading out into the unknown to find a new beginning. To find a new tribe to call home and grow old with.
Here, floating in the debris filled water, there is none of that comfortable context. You arrive as you cannon ball into the water, noticeably dejected and forlorn. When you come across your ship you don’t get the cozy feeling that this is something you worked on with a loved one. Instead you take in the surroundings, realize no one is left, and thank your lucky stars that there is a way forward. Not out. Just forward. There is very little animation in this game not dedicated to player interaction, so the way that the protagonist hits the water and slowly sinks in those first few moments is all we really get to draw an emotional state from and friends, it’s not a great outlook.
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2020 started with what felt like the flaring of a conflict in Iran. The whole world held their breath and waited as pundits danced across our screens and slithered through our social media feeds. As most people I know, I see war as a detestable thing, and for a moment my confidence that people would just say no to conflict began to waver. The storm passed, society exhaled, and we moved deeper into the year only to be broadsided by a dangerous and confounding pandemic. In the two years since those first days of isolation the hits just keep coming. Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s murders, weeks of BLM protests and global unrest, the tumultuous and uneasy American elections, the January 6th insurrection, the immediate fallout, the world’s growing impatience with Covid, new variants. It has felt, for an oppressively long time, like the boulder will just continue to race downhill, gathering speed and destructiveness.
In the last few weeks the boulder has taken a new and horrifying form. With the invasion of Ukraine, by Russian forces, people who grew up during the Cold War are remembering what it felt like to participate in nuclear bomb drills in school. As a parent of two young children I have found it unbelievably hard to sleep, instead doing my best to distract myself with TikTok, videogames, and literally anything that will keep my brain from asking itself, “what have I brought them into?” What does next year look like? Next month? Next week? Tomorrow?
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Again, the team at Okomotive created a world that evokes cascading disaster. Flooded towns give way to abandoned crumbling cities, the in-between a broken landscape of fallen trees and tumbled earth. The occasional wildlife you encounter above ground remind you that this disaster has removed any semblance of the living society that came before. Deer trounce over ruined walls and onto rocky outcroppings. Under the surface the aquatic life carries on, its home expanded as schools of fish trace the skeletons of a fallen world in mesmeric murmurations, as whales lumber past titanic I-beam forests.
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A few weeks ago the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released a new report that essentially said the world missed the window of opportunity to prevent most climate change catastrophes. Describing “widespread and pervasive” impacts on people, communities, and environments. Is there a window that still exists? Yes. Is it rapidly closing? Yes. Having lived through the last twenty years, it has been extremely hard to see a future in which people heed climate warnings. The army of self-educated people opposed to “Big Science” seems to be ever growing. In a world full of false flags and propagandistic content, it’s become harder to blame them outright. Who do you listen to? Who is telling the truth. It’s so easy to be led down a rabbit hole until you start to doubt what you once held confidence in. You would think that at this point they would just be able to see the signs around the world. Devastating floods in Germany, relentless hurricanes in the Caribbean, earthquakes around the world. The planet is responding to our abuse. But are we listening?
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In the FAR series of games, it seems abundantly clear that no, not enough people listened. And much like the deep fear that rests somewhere in my chest, the FAR titles softly whisper the question, “What will the children do?” FAR: Lone Sails gave us Lone, leaving behind her deceased father and heading toward the coast. There are a few paintings you come across along the way, but it would be entirely reasonable to conclude that, due to Lone’s design, she could be a child or an adult. FAR: Changing Tides gives us a similarly designed character, this time named Toe. But within the events of this second game there is verifiable evidence that Toe, and by extension Lone, are in fact children. It was a confirmation that stunned me, delivered in a way that had a deeply reverberating impact, increasing in momentum as I journeyed further from that moment.
These are children. It reframes the experience of both games. The fact that Lone and Toe both had to jump to hit buttons in their ships, the effort it took for them to push in drive switches, even the tutorialization itself, takes on new meaning. It’s heartbreaking, given the slightest amount of time to use my imagination, to imagine what my little girl would do to survive. My little boy. Trying to figure out how to make these giant machines work, lifting boxes and debris over their heads to bring back for fuel, the terror in their hearts as a storm approaches, or as a wave washes them away.
While I played FAR: Lone Sails I constantly felt the child in me. As I pushed my way through the wild and abandoned world it felt like a negotiation with my grief. Piloting this creation, a project shared with a passed relative, an allegory to carrying my grief like luggage. In FAR: Changing Tides I saw myself as a father, no longer experiencing the game as the protagonist, but instead as the voice in their head. Just keep pushing. You’re doing so well. Don’t give up.
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It is no small feat to create a video game that impacts players on the level that Lone Sails impacted me. The fact that Okomotive was able to return with a sister game that confronted a wholly new (albeit not altogether separate) set of emotions is worthy of deep praise. Changing Tides is incredible, a work that bears the responsibility of being a “sequel” extremely well. From the first moments to its truly special ending.
Games are art. Art is inherently political. The FAR games stare right into environmental disaster, and then through that lens tell tales of survival, endurance, and the relationships we have with our machines. Changing Tides wasn’t a pleasant surprise, that implies that I wasn’t sure it would be good. Instead it is exactly what I had wanted and hoped for: A game that would evoke an emotional response, and then prompt me to confront that response.
I appreciate these folks tremendously, and I can not wait to see what comes next. Though I have a few ideas…
@LubWub
~Caleb