Survival games are experiencing a bit of a moment, and with titles like last year’s Pacific Drive proving there’s still tons of room for imagination in this genre, survival’s popularity shows no signs of slowing down. Whilst it’s been in the works for quite a long time now, Forever Skies – with its 1.0 release on the near horizon – looks to be releasing at the most opportune time. The gameplay loop here is familiar, but there’s also enough innovation to ensure the game stands on its own.
It’s been in early access since June 2023
That’s quite a long time, one-and-three-quarter years developer Far From Home have been remodelling Forever Skies. In that time, the aeronautical survival adventure has received 34 updates to become unrecognisable from its earliest iteration. Resource extracting tools, more methods to safely store and prepare toxic food, recycling stations, a broader selection of airship modifications, plus inventory management overhauls and boons to locale variety the brief highlights of a wealth of changes included in Forever Skies’ 1.0 release.
Release date, platforms, and price
Forever Skies is coming to PC via Steam and PlayStation 5 on April 14th, 2025. Priced at $29.99 on Steam and $34.99 for the base game on PlayStation. There is a Deluxe Edition pre-orderable for PlayStation users, with 5 unique airship decorations, 5 PSN avatars, and 72-hour early access included for an extra $5. Also of note: PS Plus subscribers can pre-order right up until the 14th of April release date for 20% off.
What it’s about
Returning to Earth hundreds of years after a mysterious ecological catastrophe blanketed the planet in toxic smog, you’re a scientist pursuing a rumoured cure to the infection rendering Earth unhabitable to humans. You’ll explore rusting ruins, scavenge supplies, scan materials, and enhance your hi-tech airship on a mission to bring the last remnants of humanity out of interstellar limbo and back to their home planet. Mystery behind Earth’s environmental disaster plus the happenstance of prior return expeditions are story beats to unlock throughout your journey.
Developed by an experienced team
Wroclaw-based Far From Home are the team behind this one, and they’re a talented bunch with a wealth of experience working on a host of well-known titles. Between them, the Polish developers are bringing expertise from the Dying Light series, The Medium, and Outriders. If there’s ever a marker for the quality of a game, it’s the experience the team behind it are bringing to the table.
Airship customization
Early on in Forever Skies, you’ll procure the carcass of an airship lying in wait following the failure of a prior expedition. It won’t stay bare for long though; this airship evolves into more than your mode of transport. As more modules and apparatus are added, the airship becomes your laboratory, your workshop, your home. With a host of customisations – from new rooms, furniture, and decorations – the airship becomes uniquely yours. A word of warning though: Forever Skies is a perilous experience. The integrity of your airship, as you probably expect, must be maintained.
Airship maintenance
And on that note, it isn’t just the hull of your airship that’ll need to be patched up following mid-air debris collision or an overzealous approach to your latest abandoned radio tower. No, it’s engines demand fuel – which, thankfully, can be extracted and fabricated from material debris floating through the air – your scientific gizmos require batteries, your air balloon requiring helium. There’s plenty in terms of airship maintenance to keep you occupied during excursions.
Science
You’re a scientist, so naturally scientific discovery plays a huge part in Forever Skies’ progression. Not long after acquiring your airship you’ll be instructed to research and fabricate – via an onboard 3D printer – a scanner. With this scanner you can accumulate information on numerous bric-a-bracs littered across the elevated platforms and dishevelled windfarms explorable via your airship. Rusty turbines, crumbling building material, floating tumble weed, and this knowledge can be fed right into an onboard research station, providing the knowhow to 3D print fuel, cooking appliances, quality of life improvements, airship components – anything, really, to enhance your experience above Earth’s sickly green clouds. Blueprints ascertainable throughout the world provide extra means to craft something integral to survival and discovery too.
Survival mechanics
You’ll need to maintain the integrity of your body as well as your airship, and that means managing hunger, thirst, health, and energy levels. The latter can be easily topped up during quieter moments by having a lie down, whilst health – at least during the game’s demo – is only affected by high falls and can be replenished via collectable health kits. Hunger and thirst are the killers, and this being a toxic world as you can expect the collectable food and drink can be harmful if not cooked or purified respectively. The means boiling moths and filtering water collected from putrid pools should be your top priorities for research and crafting.
Survival activities
We’ve alluded to this already, but the bulk of your activity throughout Forever Skies will be in picking Earth’s elevated ruins clean. Mechanical parts, batteries, health items, these will provide the meat for yours and your airship’s bones. An especially useful gizmo for scavenging is an airship mounted turret which can extract building materials such as metal and glass via transparent laser beam, raw materials required to craft the game’s smorgasbord of items.
You can descend to the Earth’s surface
Eventually, that is. At first, your body and your protective clothing can’t withstand the effects of Earth’s noxious fog, but with enough scientific know-how you’ll get there. Upon the planet’s surface, you’ll encounter strange flora and fauna; plant life which has adapted to the harsh climate and creatures which have forged their own survival. It’s a strange world below the dust, and it’s here, perhaps, where viral antidotes can be sourced.
Combat
Yes, Forever Skies will feature combat. As is typical of games of this genre, the abandoned environment uninhabitable to humanity has birthed hostile life, and it’ll be down to you to wield a range of firearms to protect yourself. Via previews, the team at Far From Home have shared images of mantis-like creatures that’ll provide threat. More enemies – maybe even rival factions – will make an appearance. The gameplay loop currently is rather calm, so there’s a question as to whether this game needs combat. If it’s done without being too intrusive, it could prove welcome.
4-player co-op
One of the community’s most asked for features during the game’s early access period launched on December 9th and will be available upon launch. In fact, footage of players working together to procure resources has featured prominently in gameplay shared thus far. Building airships, exploring, and plain surviving will be enjoyable in squads of up to four.
Post-launch roadmap
There’s a hefty roadmap, or, rather, a flight plan, of post-launch updates confirmed for Forever Skies. Coming summer 2025 is an update to airship expansions, whilst a substantial content update is slated for late-summer, early fall. Coming in December 2025 will be a seasonal update – snow perhaps?
PS5 demo currently available
Right up until the game’s launch on April 14th there is a demo for PlayStation players available directly from the PS Store. The demo covers at least the first hours’ worth of play – acquiring an airship, laying foundation for the narrative’s mystery, exploring a range of creaking platforms above the green clouds. For PC players, well, there was once a demo available on Steam, but this is currently unlisted.
PC requirements
At a bare minimum, to run Forever Skies on your PC you’ll need an Intel Core i5-7600 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 processor, RX 580 8GB VRAM, Intel Arc A750, or GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU, and 12GB RAM. Recommend specs as per the game’s Steam page include an Intel Core i7-7700k or Ryzen 7 3800X, RX 5700-XT, Intel Arc A770, or GeForce RTX 2070 GPU, and 16GB RAM. No matter your setup, you’ll need 31GB of storage space.
