Probably best thought of as "part 2" rather than a sequel. Doesn't really introduce any new themes or perspectives, but does preserve the charm of the first game. However, the landscapes, while mostly empty, feel unfinished rather than desolate. Desolation requires points of reference (buildings, plants, etc.) so that we understand how empty a place is via comparison. This has some, but not enough. The first few minutes were good– the arctic sequence was terrible. Can be finished in just a few hours, so worth your time if you liked the world of the first game.

A boy and his boat

Side-scrolling adventure in a post-apocalyptic world.

Push boxes ! Press buttons ! Pretty basic stuff but the art direction and especially the music are great.

Manipulating the boat quickly feels tedious though.

Just like Lone Sails, it tries to "wow" you with its presentation, but it's not doing much for me personally. It does add some depth to its predecessor's minimal story though, making both games in conjunction work better as an emotionally resonant adventure, but I'm not sure if it's still enough to rate them any higher. Enjoyed both games still, I just wish more from them.

If you did enjoy Lone Sails, go right ahead and try this one, because it's pretty much more of the same while also not feeling as repetitive with the addition of variety to your traversal and mechanics.

Joel Schoch pleeease make more video game soundtracks.

★★½ – Average ✅

The ending of FAR: Lone Sails left the door open for a sequel but didn’t exactly beg for one. Having now finished part two, I have to wonder if FAR was always conceived as a series or if the sequel was created in response to the first game’s popularity.

The biggest change here is that the desert of Lone Sails has been replaced by endless sea. Brown and grey have given way to blue and green, sand dunes to cresting waves, decrepit factories to sunken monoliths. Though the world is as desolate as ever, now there is a sense that hope lies just over the horizon.

FAR: Changing Tides does improve on certain aspects of its predecessor. Controlling your craft is slightly more involved this time around, for one. You travel in a bigger machine, one with more buttons to push and mechanisms to manage. The new craft is also more capable of exploring its surroundings than the first game’s land crawler was. To say more would be to spoil the surprises that await.

Yet for all the mechanical improvements, this sequel fails the match the emotional impact of its older sibling. In Lone Sails, the land crawler was like my best friend – my only friend, in fact. I had to keep it in tip-top shape and full of fuel or else I’d end up stranded in a wasteland with no food and no future. By shifting from desert to ocean, Changing Tides quiets that nagging sense of dread. No fuel? You can still drift along, riding the currents wherever they may take you. No food? There’s plenty of fish in the sea – literally. You can even watch whales swim past in the background. Though the moment-to-moment gameplay has largely remained the same, the change in scenery completely recontextualizes it, and not for the better.

Don’t get me wrong. Games shouldn’t all be post-apocalyptic journeys of brown and grey – a lesson the early years of the seventh console generation taught us well. But in the original FAR, the visuals, gameplay, and theme all felt tightly aligned; in the sequel, the resonance between these elements is weaker. If there’s going to be a FAR: The Third, it’ll need to get more creative. Would co-op play do the trick? I'm not sure, but I’d be shocked if the developers haven’t at least considered it.

Siempre es necesario acudir al sector independiente para encontrar experiencias jugables nuevas, y en este caso nos encontramos con una experiencia en la que la fisicidad del barco que manejamos lo es todo. Tenemos el control absoluto del barco, y somos el único culpable de sus idas y venidas. Esta simbiosis crea una fuerte conexión con el navío, aunque al final se acaba echando en falta un poco más de variabilidad en el conjunto, especialmente en el tramo final, que parece algo alargado sin motivo aparente.

It pains me to rate this so low.

The first game was a cute little melancholy jaunt across a desolate wasteland. You managed your fun little vehicle and occasionally solved tiny puzzles that fed into the world and its lore. It reached a high point then a low point, then ended on a somber note with a tiny glimmer of hope.

The sequel... it's the same but worse.

The visuals have improved and the tech was expanded but the new visuals hurt the performance and the new tech leads to frustrating puzzles that didn't work properly during my playthrough.

I first bought this game on switch thinking 'the first one was so simple surely I can just play this on switch' but it ran so poorly I couldn't make basic jumps consistently which made it fundamentally unplayable.

On my PC I still had to run this game at medium settings.

The new mechanics are interesting at first but I constantly ran into puzzles that didn't trigger properly then got stuck for minutes before giving up to check a guide only to find out the puzzle just broke for me and I'd have to keep trying the same thing till it worked.

Everything in this game is made more tedious, it has all the same beats as the first game but many are repeated additional times, result in dead ends, and all of them take WAY longer on the ship.

The dead ends are the weirdest part, at least three times the game reached a sort of punctuation mark then shrugged at me and told me to keep going.

On top of that the achievements felt condescending. telling me 'what now' after one of the big false endings or congratulating itself on the real ending.

Worst of all the stellar soundtrack from the first game is toned down heavily in this one. There's still some incredible musical moments but they're fewer and further between.

I went into this game so wanting to love it but it dragged my patience to its limit then clapped for itself awkwardly.

I just couldn't like this game.

The best moment was a major spoiler that I won't mention here. it's also needlessly harsh but I suppose it was earned regardless.

True enough, a game I wholeheartedly consider to be a watertight little marvel was graced with a sequel that promises bigger and better - and in their attempt to deliver, it begins to burst at the seams. There was a certain elegance to the way the Okomotive, the main mode of transport in FAR: Lone Sails, was designed. In the context clarity for which every function and dial coexists with the rest of the machine and how breezy it felt to dart around its internals. Much of that game’s appeal was in the ease with which you could Zombie Mode it, stringing together repeated steam release speed boosts while spinning all the other managerial plates thrown your way, all with enough spare time to enjoy the journey you’re making.

FAR: Changing Tides trades the Benz for the boat, with an interesting inversion of the previous title’s control scheme, and a very different internal routine you’ll have to learn and adapt to as an increasing amount of plates demand to be spinned. I’m all for a spot of intentioned friction in my games, but it felt as though I was struggling with the control scheme more often than the barge itself. Changing Tides’ doesn’t let you hold on to the momentum you build for very long before you need to grind to a halt, it’s a very harsh stop-and-start routine you have to rigidly follow. My main source of disappointment is in how I felt as though I stared at my vehicle’s gauges and switches for far longer than the stunning environments rolling by, bumping around its cramped internals and trying to nurture any semblance of speed I built. All of this is a thorn in the side of a game that deserves to be absorbed into. It pains me to hear a wonderful piece of background score coming to an end before I can reach the finale of a setpiece or chapter. There's a lot of strained silence in stretches of Changing Tides that smack less of Muted Immersion and more that I’m Fucking Up Somewhere. This kind of lack of clarity tends to extend to the puzzle the segments that break up the boat trips, I’m somewhat in disbelief at how often they’d place items or levers behind obstructing pieces of geometry.

Not without its flashes of brilliance, don’t get me wrong. When the going gets going, and you hit the supercharge, carving your ship through the cerulean nebula, I felt like I was driving a carmine dagger and dealing the killing blow to God. In a stunningly good final act, Changing Tides is genuinely host to one of the biggest sentimental sequel popoffs I’ve had since Shadow Moses in MGS4. I can forgive all matter of ooo clunkiness when a game makes me loudly exclaim “No Fucking Way”.