FAR: Changing Tides

Let's have a look at FAR: Changing Tides, a new game from the makers of FAR: Lone Sails (2018). It's a 3D-but-viewed-from-the-side platform puzzle game with an artistic bent. In Lone Sails you drove a train that went on the land, just like a train. In Changing Tides you drive a train that goes in the water, which is a boat.

A train that goes in the water is a boat. I enjoyed Lone Sails. It only took a few hours to finish, and I haven't played it since I wrote about it in 2019, but the soundtrack was lovely and the storyline was surprisingly affecting. It was simple but bittersweet. I admired the game's thematic consistency.

Changing Tides is similar but not as good. I didn't feel anything, and the gameplay isn't enough to fill that emptiness. It's not bad, it just feels prosaic in comparison.

In Lone Sails you controlled a little girl called Lone, who found herself lost in a frozen wilderness. Her only friend was the Okomotive, a steam-powered vehicle made by her late father:

fastened to a dying animal

The gameplay consisted of stoking the Okomotive's engine and working out how to move past the obstacles that lay in its path. There wasn't much to it, but something about the act of maintaining a steam engine in a bleak, empty landscape was appealing. It had a sense of hygge, which was one of those trendy words that was all the rage in 2018.

Changing Tides captures that feeling as well, especially given that your vehicle can go underwater! At one point I rode out a nasty storm by submerging and chugging gracefully through the ocean depths.  Periodically I pressed a button and jumped on some bellows, which wasn't difficult at all, but it was engaging because it felt cosy. Neither Lone Sails nor Changing Tides are full-on The Sims, but they do have a little world all their own.

This time you're a little boy who finds himself lost in a frozen etc. Your only friend is a big boat thing - I have no idea what it's called - that can sail or chug-chug through the water. When you want to use sail power you have to tack the sails, and when you want to chug-chug you have to pump up some steam and set the throttle. You can even combine the two power sources if you want to go really fast, but you have to take care to drop the sails when you go through tunnels, otherwise some of the gears start to throw out sparks and you have to fix them.

See the blue circle in the screenshot above? Your vehicle has a sensor of some kind, and the little dot represents fuel. Sometimes you have to venture outside to pick up bits of wood, cans of petrol, discarded suitcases etc, all of which go in the vehicle's boiler.

The game has a completely linear left-to-right path. The fuel tends to appear in places where you need it, and it respawns if you run out. You can't really explore the world, and except for one scripted sequence you can't go into or out of the background.

Visually the game is a little more inventive than the original, with automatic pans and zooms that point out significant details.

The game divides into essentially three elements. For the most part you drive, sail, motor, and swim through the world in your vehicle, but occasionally you have to hop out in order to interact with giant abandoned machines that block your path. Along the way you upgrade your vehicle and use its systems to reawaken the relics of a bygone society.

None of the puzzles are particularly difficult, and you can't die or lose. In the original there was one part where you could fail, but the game wrote it off as a dream sequence; in the sequel there's a scary bit near the beginning, but nothing especially bad comes of it. Beyond a few prompts the game has no dialogue and no instructions, but the intricacies of your vehicle are well-signposted and the puzzles are designed in such a way that you can press things at random without getting permanently stuck, just like the original.

This does however lead to one of the game's problems, which is that it feels like a retread of Lone Sails. You hook things up to your vehicle's winch and pull them out of the way, just like the original. You activate ancient power sources in order to open doors, which is nothing new, and you repair damage to your vehicle by fiddling around with what appears to be the same oil can. I managed to finish the entire game in a little over five hours, because having played Lone Sails I wasn't surprised by any of the sequel's puzzles.

In its favour the game has considerable visual spectacle, but after a while that wore out. It has a slightly more realistic look than Lone Sails, which unfortunately means that instead of being timelessly stylish it reminded me uncomfortably of Myst.

Lone Sails had an excellent soundtrack that put me in mind of early Michael Nyman, with rude saxophone parps and lovely strings. Clarinets. Oboes, I don't know. Those woodwind instruments that go parp. The soundtrack was synchronised with the action, which worked extremely well. In contrast the music of Changing Tides is deployed only intermittently, and none of the themes are as memorable. There's nothing wrong with the soundtrack, it just feels like b-roll out-takes from the original.

The biggest problem is the storyline. Or rather than lack of a theme. Lone Sails was a meditation on the strength of the soul versus the frailty of the human body. During the first half of the game Lone patches up the Okomotive, and for a brief shining moment she is top of the world - such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold - but it starts to break down, and by the end of the game the broken wreckage of the machine crawls to its death on the shores of Byzantium.

In contrast Changing Tides has none of this. There's a contextual story of a race of ancients who seemed to meet their end by tampering with power they could not control, but it's slight. Beyond that there's no theme, no emotional core. It's just a cute little puzzle platform game that takes only a few hours to finish. If Lone Sails had been 2001: A Space Odyssey, Changing Tides is 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Decent in its own right, very plain.

The ending made me smile, though, particularly one of the ending slides.

One thing puzzled me. The game has a massive, massive credits list. It seems to have more developers than Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. There are two separate localisation teams based in Japan and Montreal, despite the fact that the game has no written language or any dialogue, plus an "influencer manager". Perhaps they wanted to make sure that arrows were not offensive in Japan, who knows. Given that the game only costs £14.99 I wonder how much money will be left in the pot once their wages are paid.

Changing Tides is available for the PC, the XBox, and the PlayStation (4 and 5). On a technical level it feels slightly odd as a PC game, because it's keyboard-only - the mouse does nothing, not even in the menus - and you can't redefine the keys. I don't have a problem with that, but perhaps you might.