The world is a lovely place when viewed from the skies. All the detritus of the land is obscured as the perspective changes and what had seemed huge is now revealed as just a small part of a much bigger whole. The problem is when the “small part” is the remains of a skyscraper and the “much bigger whole” is a green miasma covering the entire planet, making it impossible to set down below a few hundred feet. There are terrible things in the mist, but it’s relatively safe above it, floating through the world and scavenging supplies from the ruined buildings still accessible in the sky.
Forever Skies is an adventure survival game on the remains of a ruined Earth, with the hope that maybe it won’t have to be ruined forever. A lone explorer has been sent to investigate a signal from the research team that had made its base on the top floors of a derelict skyscraper. Almost immediately things go wrong, but a hard landing is still a decent one seeing as he can walk away from it. With no supplies or support it’s going to take some quick scavenging to stay healthy, but the research base provides basics, and luckily enough, a fabricator plus the bones of an unfinished airship. The scientists are long dead, possibly killed by one of their own who went insane, but whatever happened is less important at the moment than immediate survival.
The demo of Forever Skies is divided into two parts, the first of which lets you explore and fabricate to your heart’s content while the second starts a clock that counts down towards the demo’s conclusion. The first part takes place on the intro skyscraper, starting with the crash-landing and setting up the story. The beautifully-detailed environment is a wreck, but it’s holding together thanks to the last remaining shreds of steel, concrete and glass. Metal and synthetics (plastic, basically) waste is lying around ready to be recycled into new forms, while useful materials such as clean water and edible food are more scarce. Datapads give out bits of lore, rare batteries can be used to power machinery and new tech schematics let you upgrade the airship into a flying home.
You need to be careful, though, because diseases are everywhere and it’s easy to catch something unpleasant. The tasty-looking sunfruit, for example, don’t fill up much of the food meter so eating a bunch seems like a good idea, right up until the sunlight becomes painful. While clean water is scarce, dirty water is plentiful and can also be collected in plastic bottles for later use. It’s probably best to avoid the hit to health and instead scour the environment for the couple cans of clean water lying around, rationing them out until after the water purifier is built and installed on the airship. As for the moths you may catch by dangling a bit of bait off the edge of the building, while technically you can eat them raw one of the earliest finds is the cooker, so whatever horrible thing eating raw moth that’s lived its life flying around the green mist might give you can remain a mystery.
All of this is found in that first area, but once you’ve gathered enough resources for a steady supply of food and water it’s time to build the engine. There aren’t enough resources in the opening area just by picking stuff up to make all this, so one of the earliest devices is the Deck Extractor, which sits on the airship’s deck and can be used to harvest the chunks of material that are too big to gather by hand. Metal paneling, glass windows and the floating balls of debris flying through the air all get zapped down to their base components, and with minimal effort can be used to make an engine or two. One engine is slow, two engines are faster, and with patience in resource harvesting and careful placement on the ship there’s room for a third, but all of them need fuel. Sort that out and the demo goes into its second part, which is world exploration.
Out in the world are points of interest marked by a blinking red light. These points are where you’ll find new tech, lore and other goodies, eventually exploring your way to Forever Skies' plot. The demo doesn’t go that far, with the timer cutting out just when things start getting interesting with the possibility of building new rooms for the cramped airship’s cabin, and it left me wishing there was more time to play with the new toys. It’s enough to be interesting, though, and theExploration trailerfrom a few months back gives a few hints of the possibilities ahead including combat, fancier gadgets to repair a damaged ship or gather the bigger resources by zappy-beam, and of course a much bigger airship. For now, though, Forever Skies has a limited demo, and while proportionally it’s a slow burn to the good bits, it arrives there with a clear promise of much more to come.
