Creating a game with one person is not an easy task. Previously, when to develop your own project it was enough to be “just” a good programmer and have a couple of interesting ideas, such solo developers were not something exceptional. And even now, with the rise of indie, it’s quite possible for one person to create his own project. But it will be a difficult road. It’s difficult with fresh ideas – “everything was invented before us”; decent graphics require the skills of an artist and designer, and thanks to that very “flourishing” it’s difficult to stand out among other similar projects.

Author Far Out, working almost alone, was able to achieve this goal. After just over three years of development and several postponements of the release date, the game has finally reached release. Now we’ll find out what was hidden behind the promising description and beautiful screenshots all this time.

Such a strange color scheme is not a bug. For normal lighting, the ship’s power must be turned on.

It’s never a good morning

A long sleep is interrupted by a sudden awakening. The head is splitting from pain, it is difficult for the eyes to focus, and the body barely obeys commands. I’m trying hard to look around. Where am I? And who am I?

So, judging by the surroundings, I’m on a spaceship. Here is the cryocapsule I just got out of, here is the first aid kit hidden in the wall (so what are these pills? I’ll eat a couple – maybe it’ll make me feel better). To open the door, you probably need to press some button… Yeah, probably this one. Numbers flicker on the board nearby – a three-digit number, you need to remember it just in case. Outside there is a dimly lit corridor, along the walls of which some wires and pipes stretch. Doors leading to other rooms, stairs to the upper deck… So, what is that button on the wall? Click? Perhaps it’s possible. I know what I’m doing, don’t I??

The click of the switch is drowned out by the pop of an explosion. A flame escapes from a hole in one of the tubes. Fire! Trying to run away from the flames, I cling to the wall and end up in the thick of it. A couple of seconds of unsuccessful attempts to break free – and it’s all over. Darkness.

What was that?

This was my first attempt to play Far Out. Questions about why we had to leave the cryocapsule ahead of time, what is happening on the ship and what is generally required of us torment not only the main character, but also the player. I couldn’t find any background in the form of a video or even a short note. The Steam page also doesn’t add much clarity, providing only the most general description. A spaceship on which an accident occurred, you are one of the crew members, your task is to survive and find out what happened to the others and what was the cause of the breakdown.

Everything else, including the https://nokyccasinos.org.uk/review/spinscastle/ name of the main character, you have to find out yourself. Well, quite in the spirit of the “old school”, as the developer promised, but still, with the lack of information, especially at the initial stage, the author went too far. A small note describing the current situation – and it would be much more pleasant to play.

It turned out to be hardcore, but during the first playthrough you feel not at all like a member of the crew of the starship Selena named Zach Peterson (and all this becomes clear much later), but like a laboratory mouse that was launched into a special labyrinth with a bunch of levers and switches, the purpose of which it itself does not know. So is the player – there are a lot of objects on the ship with which you can interact, but there is no understanding of what is generally required of us.

Of course, after a while you get the hang of it a little. You begin to act quite consciously, but the ship is reluctant to reveal its secrets. That’s when the real game begins – but such a crumpled start spoils a lot.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

"Selena" is a scientific spacecraft, a small vessel with a crew of four people. Don’t expect any impressive scale – by the standards of modern games, the starship is quite small, you won’t be able to get lost there. Several compartments – a living area, a commander’s room, a hangar, a laboratory… However, you will have to carefully study the environment in order not only to survive, but also to understand what happened.

Far Out uses the mechanics of such a subgenre of quests as Escape the Room – “escape the room”. This kind of entertainment is quite popular, and not in video games, but in its real form. A person or a group of people is locked in a room, and they need to get out of it using various environmental objects, solving a chain of riddles. As a rule, the time for completing a quest is limited: if you don’t make it on time, you lose. So it is here: there are enough options for interacting with various objects and mechanisms (almost any thing can at least be picked up and dragged to another place), but how to use them correctly – you have to guess.

Separately, it is worth mentioning the on-board computer, the control terminal of which is located on the bridge – it contains a lot of useful information that will be useful in order to survive. But not everything is so simple – the key to solving another riddle is sometimes found in a completely different place.

There is also a time limit. The fact is that “Selena” is in disrepair. The ship may run out of oxygen or energy – the consequences of this will be dire. Moreover, from time to time various events occur that directly affect the situation on the ship, and their course may differ with each passage. A sudden shutdown of artificial gravity or a fire in the compartment forces urgent measures to be taken – otherwise the ending of the story will be much sadder than planned.

The promised nonlinearity is available – each start of a new game will provide our hero with a new set of events. There are also several possible endings, depending on which path to salvation the player chooses. And definitely don’t expect that you will be able to complete the quest the first time – as already said, there is too little information for this and there is a strict time crunch.

Weightlessness took us by surprise – we had to cling to interior items in order to somehow move.

This has already happened in The Simpsons

One of the strengths Far Out – this is, of course, design. Retrofuturism is in fashion today, but there’s so much of it here that it’s dizzying. You constantly notice obvious and not so obvious borrowings from cult science fiction works. And in general, if you take a closer look, the story in the game is cobbled together from individual episodes borrowed from the classics. After all, what new can you come up with in the standard plot of “survival on a spaceship with which something strange happened?”?

But this is not blind copying – we have a conscious choice of a similar approach to design. Here you notice a piece from "Space Odyssey", here "Through the Horizon", and from comparison with "Strangers" and you’re not going anywhere at all. The references turned out to be surprisingly organic and fit well into the atmosphere of the game. Moreover, they are the ones who create it.

There is also a good range of music that creates the right mood at certain moments. The voice of the main character belongs to himself Boris Repetur, something the developer is very proud of. This is also a plus… probably.

But not everything is so smooth. The immersion can be ruined by bugs, of which there are not just a lot, but a lot. It’s easy to fall through the texture and fly into outer space (the funny thing is that this can be counted as a successful ending!). Unresponsive controls, getting stuck in walls, scripts that don’t always work, and less noticeable bugs haunt the player throughout his entire playthrough. To the credit of the developer, bugs are quickly eliminated (although sometimes the next patch generates new ones).

If the author had left his brainchild after release in the condition in which it was published, I would have gone Far Out straight to the trash can. But in just a week, the developer managed to bring the project to a completely playable state, which allows you to enjoy the passage. Now the advantages of the game outweigh the remaining shortcomings – before us is a difficult but interesting adventure, filled with the atmosphere of classic science fiction. Fans of sci-fi from the last century will definitely not be disappointed.

Pros: atmosphere of retrofuturism; references to classic fiction of the last century; interesting riddles; nice music.

Cons: bugs; lack of information on the first playthrough; inconvenient controls.