Forever Skies

From its opening planetary descent to the near-identical voice of its virtual assistant, Forever Skies frequently evokes memories of Subnautica to propel its survival experience.

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It’s not a bad model to imitate. Subnautica remains one of the best survival games, fusing the genre’s crafting and resource gathering with a dazzling aquatic world, a thrilling mystery, and a trio of delightful underwater vehicles. Far From Home hopes to conjure a similar experience, but swaps the ocean for the troposphere, and Subnautica’s submarine for a zeppelin that you pilot over a post-apocalyptic Earth. Yet while Forever Skies has sturdy foundations, it lacks the wonder of Unknown Worlds’ undersea adventure.

You play a space-dwelling survivor of a pandemi (or one of several, if you play in co-op), returning to Earth to seek a cure for the virus that has made the planet uninhabitable, and which now infects the orbital station where the remnants of humanity survive. Below a certain altitude, the air roils with thick, contagious dust that can suffocate a person in minutes. To stay alive, you must remain above this as much as possible. Luckily, the ruined skyscraper your drop-pod crashes into happens to have a small airship moored to its roof. This airship is both your base of operations and your primary means of moving through the world. It’s also the most enjoyable aspect of Forever Skies.

Initially little more than a tram carriage tied to a balloon, your airship can be expanded into a multistorey floating building that functions as a home, a research centre and a virology lab. Construction is as fun as it is intuitive, with the building tools letting you assemble new rooms in seconds, fringe the vehicle with gantries and safety rails, place engines for propulsion and turbines to generate lift, and even expand the balloon, enabling it to support more weight (ie, a larger base).