Forever Skies Early Impressions

Minecraft, Valheim, The Forest, Don't Starve. All of these games are outlined as great survival titles, and while they let you build up your own base to thrive in an otherwise harsh environment, that homestead cannot move with you. It does not soar up into the air, allowing you to further explore the map while being right next to the safety of your bed.

This is where Forever Skies comes in. The new survival game from Far From Home, Forever Skies plonks you down in the middle of a post-apocalyptic earth, where a thick layer of dust covers all but the tallest of buildings, and asks you to make a life in this barren place. Immediately you'll find that the world is both hostile and beautiful. It's clear that earth is no longer fit for human life, as I swiftly discovered when I ate the first bit of food the game offered to me only to find that it gave me a disease that meant I took damage each time I looked in the general direction of the sun. However, at the same time, it's hard not to be lured in by Forever Skies' visuals. As you ride your ship from tower to tower, collecting resources, it's easy to just find yourself staring off into the distance, at the colourful dust cloud enveloping what was once humanity's home.

After a few minutes of gameplay, where you find your ship and fit it out with a fabricator, research station, and engine, you're free to explore how you see fit. There are objectives given to you, and it might be best to follow those for the first couple of hours to get to grips on everything, but after that you're free to spend as much time flying around as you see fit. Exploring isn't just for the fun of it, though, as you'll need to build resources and most importantly, try not to die while you're in the wasteland that once was earth.

You have four metres in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, measuring energy, food, water, and health. Food and water are the ones that you'll have to keep an eye on constantly, as they drop the quickest and should they reach zero you're done for. I was a bit taken aback at first how unforgiving Forever Skies can be at times. You really need to get cracking with making sure you've got regular food and water if you want to survive, and so I stuffed a cooker, water purifier, and more in my shuttle of an airship, which left it feeling rather cramped considering the research station and fabricator were already taking up good chunks of space.

When you do get a minute in between boiling giant moths and turning green water clear, you can upgrade your ship however you see fit, adding more rooms for a more spacious environment, or a load of catwalks so you can breathe in that toxic air around you and get a better view of the world. I didn't go overboard with my ship customisation, as I liked the cosy aspect of a smaller environment, but there is the potential for some really impressive ship builds, which I'm sure we'll see now the game is in early access.

When you do kick off your odyssey into Forever Skies, be aware that it can take a while for you to feel like you've pieced most of the gameplay together. For my first hour or so, I couldn't really decide whether I had yet been drawn in by the core gameplay, but the world and visuals were fascinating enough. Then, when I got into the routine and realised what Forever Skies asked of its player, I found myself hesitating from flicking off the game as I just wanted to rip the resources out of one more tower, or boil one more bug.

Forever Skies might not be the best survival game for beginners to the genre, as even on Normal difficulty it demands a lot within the opening segment, both in terms of making sure you stay alive and regarding resources. There are a lot of vital items that need a good amount of the resources found on the map. Luckily, they are mostly in abundance early on, but the extractor on your ship is an absolute priority in that early stage. Without it, you'll be left dead in the water. Or the sky, I suppose.

We're not giving Forever Skies a rating here, as the game is still in early access and so it seems only fair to give first impressions. As it stands, though, Forever Skies hosts an incredibly interesting world, with visuals that drag you back in even when the gameplay can fall into a bit of a lull. Its ship building inspires creativity and offers a breath of (somewhat) fresh air to the survival genre.