There's a fine line between being atmospheric and introspective vs being dull and boring. While FAR: Lone Sails occasionally manages to be the former, it is far more common for it to sink to the latter. The most profound moments were easily those few occurrences where you arrive at a long desolated outpost and your radio briefly springs to life with the suggestion that there are inhabitants other than yourself tucked within the dreary landscape. Alternatively, the couple of occasions where the solemn journey was interrupted by sudden tension and you had to scramble to keep your vessel in working order were always a welcome change of pace.

I do love clunky mechanical objects where operating them for a long period endears the player to them; however, this and the evocative music and landscape is what the game really only has. Movement is unnecessary slow, puzzles are trivial, no strong resource management difficulty, I struggle to find positive points. As with experience or mood based games, the motivation and story is rather unclear perhaps not well thought out. Given its mechanics and world, I cannot understand what it is trying to say assuming how it ends or its desolate state. The game does have some heart to it but not recommend.

What a surprising little game. Aesthetically absolutely gorgeous, the entire game looks like a steampunk oil painting come to life. I don't really know what I was expecting but I probably thought there'd be a little more gameplay than there actually was - it reminded me a lot of Limbo and that brand of side-scrolling adventure game. Really intuitive though, simple but no real tutorials needed or anything, everything clicked pretty easily. The lowkey worldbuilding and art was the main reason I enjoyed this - I would have finished it regardless cos it was less than 3 hours, but the music and visuals brought it to another level. I think the soundtrack will make it into my regular mellow rotation. Really keen to play the second one, now. What a great little experience.