Post-Apocalyptic Survival Game Forever Skies Announced By Polish Studio

Two years ago, a group of Polish AAA industry veterans launched a new studio in Wrocław with big ambitions of making next-gen, “AA+” games. Now, Far From Home is ready to unveil its debut project: a sci-fi survival game about climate disaster called Forever Skies.

Originally code-named “Project Oxygen,” Forever Skies is a first-person, action/survival game that takes place on a ruined Earth years after a massive climate disaster renders it uninhabitable. It’s expected to launch on PC in early access later this year, with a next-gen console release to follow.

Far From Home is an independent Polish game studio, founded by industry veterans whose titles include games like Chernobylite, The Medium, Dying Light, Divinity: Original Sin, and Dead Island. The new studio aims to produce next-gen “AA+” games, while staying independent and working with a small team. The studio currently consists of 23 developers, many of them having previously worked on big-name AAA titles.

With the announcement, Far From Home shared a teaser trailer for Forever Skies that gives an idea of what players will experience in the post-apocalyptic world. You play as a scientist who returns to Earth in an airship that serves as your base while you explore the ruins in search of a cure for the disease ravaging the remaining population of survivors, who await in orbit. Because toxic clouds have taken over Earth’s ground level, you’ll spend a lot of time either in your airship or at the tops of tall buildings originally built to escape the increasingly dangerous surface level. There’s crafting, base building, planting, research and, eventually, combat with whatever it is lurking beneath the deadly cloud layer — an element that Far From Home wants to keep mysterious for now.

Far From Home CEO Andrzej Blumenfeld told IGN that the game’s setting was inspired by the real-world impacts of climate change in Cracow, Poland, adding that Forever Skies is explicitly intended to be about the dangers of climate change.

The focus on viruses and medical experimentation was already a part of the game before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Blumenfeld added, though the team at Far From Home ended up having to tweak how it was presented, in light of changing attitudes to disease and medical science due to the pandemic.

Forever Skies is expected to launch in early access for PC later this year, and initially will be a single-player experience. Far From Home intend to release the game at a later point on next-gen consoles, as well as adding the option to play in co-op.

The inspiration for the…thick layer of toxic dust and the skies above has been drawn from various comments of scientists on air quality in Cracow, Poland.

Climate change isn’t the only issue Far From Home has had to grapple seriously with in the making of Forever Skies. When the studio first started work on the game, COVID-19 didn’t exist yet — but the studio’s ideas for the player to research viruses and even infect themselves to get stronger were already in motion. Far From Home hasn’t scrapped the system, but the dev team has had to rethink how it was presented.

“In Forever Skies falling ill and recovering is an integral part of the survival loop,” Blumenfeld says. “On one hand it is unavoidable, resulting with symptoms impacting breath rate, tolerance to foods or causing dehydration. But on the other hand, in some cases it is required to extract pathogens for developing, and later testing of vaccines. We wanted to show how interaction with microbes is an absolutely central part of the human body’s functioning, and how thin a line is between being healthy and sick. In Forever Skies games will have open doors to experimentation, and to deciding whether to use the modified viruses as weapons, or perhaps self-infect to boost life functions and the body’s performance.

“Naturally, as the global pandemic evolved, the paradigm was shifting among media and societies. We had to adjust several times to the growing scientific evidence regarding COVID-19, as well as adopt terminology in which the developments were portrayed. At some point we also risked being interpreted as promoting the anti-vax option by mere coincidence! This all needed a few adjustments, which were advised by a renowned virologist who supports us in terms of staying true to science.”

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