Forever Skies Review – Touch the Sky

One of the most popular genres tackled by indie game developers tends to be the survival game. The kind of game where you’re thrown into an alien world with little to work with except maybe a small backpack, and you have to get to work in building shelter to survive whatever horrors the game might throw at you. Ultimately, you end up with a giant mansion that you’ve managed to design and build by yourself, along with a variety of other buildings and equipment that let you craft just about anything you can imagine. Forever Skies is an interesting new survival game where, rather than making you settle down on a plot of land, your home base instead travels right alongside you.

The premise of Forever Skies isn’t exactly groundbreaking. You end up stranded on a post-apocalyptic Earth that has been ravaged by industry and nature coming together to wreak ecological havoc. Equipped with just a 3D printer on your suit, you must now figure out how you can escape the planet, while also trying to uncover the several smaller stories that happened all around you. To help you in this ambitious task is the game’s primary gimmick: an airship that you have to design and build by yourself.

The airship is truly the lynchpin of the entire experience, since it not only does it act as your main method of transportation, it’s also your home base. As you fly around scavenging for parts, you will have set up various tools and machines all over your airship that allow you to fish for food, use a magnet to scavenge metal plates, and even conduct research on new parts and items that you can build. In fact, the airship acts as your primary path of progression throughout the game.

Rather than upgrading yourself, you’ll be spending more of your time researching new structures and parts for the airship. Want to fly even higher? Attach some turbines to the outer walls of your ship. Want to cook more food? Build some more electric cookers. Want to get your hands on some drinking water? A rainwater collector paired with a water filtration system along the walls of your airship will do the trick.

Along with the obvious advantage of being able to navigate through a fully 3D environment thanks to the power of flight, the airship also adds a new dimension to what ends up feeling like an otherwise standard survival game by encouraging exploration in a unique way. In a game like Valheim, for example, you will often find yourself limited in how far you can travel from your base, depending on the amount of food and water you carried with you, or the enemies you might face down the line. And then you also have to worry about your arduous trek back home. Forever Skies more or less removes this as a problem by making your home base your main method of exploring. You never really have to worry about a long walk back home when you’re out of food since your airship is often just a couple of minutes away.

It is worth noting, however, that the main reason for exploring the world of Forever Skies isn’t really to hunt down specific materials. Rather, you’ll be exploring around to find new blueprints and tidbits of stories told through notes that have been left behind. In some ways, the core gameplay structure of the title feels quite similar to what we’ve previously seen in games like Subnautica. Rather than the hunt for materials, exploration is instead encouraged by offering up a variety of different rewards, like the ability to make fancier doors for your airship.

Which brings us to Forever Skies’ take on what tends to be one of the most important aspects of a survival game: the building. More ambitious titles in the genre tend to be plagued with issues like awkward building controls where you often have to spend too much time simply aligning walls with the right roof.

Forever Skies introduces its own twist on the idea by simplifying the designing and building process a great deal. Rather than placing down individual tiles for flooring and walls and a roof to eventually create a room, you simply use the room tool that automatically creates a 3×3 tile room for you. This room can then be further expanded by using the room tool on its adjacent walls, or even adding flooring tiles with ladders that go up or down (allowing for quite a bit of vertical building), and once you’re happy with the room, you can finish things off by adding walls, doors and windows.

This approach to building ends up feeling incredibly intuitive, and players that tend to have more ambitious ideas for how their airship should shape up will likely be able to create some awe-inspiring designs. The simplicity of the system also goes a long way in taking out the headaches related to figuring out where you put down the various furniture and equipment you often need. Some equipment, like the Fishing tool or extra engines and turbines, can only be added to areas considered to be on the “outer” side of your airship. Others, like a fabricator or the research panel, can only be placed on the “inner” side.

Upgrading your airship in Forever Skies is also helped quite a bit thanks to the abundance of basic materials you need to actually build. Just about everything starts off by needing some combinations of Metals and Synthetic Materials. These are often found just floating around near whatever structure you’re currently exploring, and you can simply extract these materials even if they’re relatively far away.

The airship being the primary focus of the game does mean that its other elements tend to feel more anemic in comparison. Combat, for example, is incredibly bland. In fact, you won’t be getting into fights until you’re several hours into the game. In its early parts, your biggest threat tends to be a creature that will occasionally fly to your ship and try to dissolve it. The threat posed by these are minor, since they can be taken care of simply by using the Extractor on them. You do eventually get more weapons that let you deal with more imposing threats, but combat never really feels like it was meant to be the core focus here.

Similarly, even the survival mechanics feel half-baked. You typically have three things you need to pay attention to: hunger, thirst, and energy. None of these stats ever really pose any real threat, since there is plenty of food and water to go around. And as for energy, you can quickly regain it the moment you research and build a bed. Ultimately, the survival mechanics don’t really end up adding much to the general experience. Unlike in a game like Valheim, where specific food offers unique buffs, you never really have to worry about the concept aside from making sure you don’t starve.

Forever Skies definitely feels like it belongs in a specific sub-genre of survival games alongside titles like Subnautica and The Raft. Rather than focusing on the core sandbox experience, the game is instead more focused on presenting a unique world with an interesting story, and letting you go explore to your heart’s content. And while its main story might not be anything groundbreaking, it ends up giving you just enough of an incentive to explore the lush world.

This game was reviewed on PC.