“Forever Skies” vagabond demo I miss the poisonous smog of my hometown
Shijiazhuang, where our homeless star is located, is an industrial city. In the past half month, the air was still moderately polluted for 7 days. Every time I take off the mask, my mind sometimes goes back to three or five years ago, when people were still troubled by various invisible substances in the air. The purpose of wearing a mask when going out was not to isolate the virus, but the name of PM2 .5 pollutants.
With the passage of time, we seem to be much less sensitive to environmental protection today. We don’t monitor air quality every day as before, and talk about energy saving, emission reduction and low-carbon life. But more and more weather anomalies, reports of glaciers still melting, news of the highest local temperature in XX years. There is still a vague concern, are people still doing environmental protection work? Is the earth about to burp?
“Environmental protection”, a word that was originally just and legitimate, now has a pejorative connotation because of the double-standard Swedish environmental protection girl. Or it is used by some organizations under the banner of environmental protection and life, ignoring the laws of nature again and again to seek benefits.
But there are more environmentalists who are really doing practical things. They use actions, words and works to tell us that environmental protection is not a slogan that can be forgotten after shouting a few times. In Poland, a group of developers created an alternative “environmental protection” game “Forever Skies” with this idea in mind.
The city of Kraków, the largest industrial city in southern Poland, regularly has pollutants that exceed the maximum allowed safe levels, and it even became the first city in Poland to ban the burning of coal and wood. According to an analysis by an environmental expert, it is only possible to see a clear sky and breathe harmless air when it rises “100 meters” above the city. In other words, only high-rise buildings with more than 25 floors are suitable for residents to live in.
“Due to the accumulation of more and more dust and toxic gases on the ground, human beings will have to escape to high towers to survive” – the current situation in Krakow, which is the inspiration for the development team Far From Home to create “Forever Skies” source. The game production team is puzzled by the objective climate deterioration and the society’s indifferent attitude towards it. They hope to use the game method to shape a bad future in which human beings are indifferent to the environment, and tell everyone how urgent the environmental problems we are facing are.
We were fortunate enough to be invited to play the beta version of the game, although the content was only the prologue, and the process was limited to 20 minutes. But I still replayed it many times, feeling the overwhelming sense of oppression brought about by this overly polluted and dying earth. (Actually…the first few times I didn’t complete the mission goal within the time limit)
Since the two most important resources in the demo, “metal” and “composite”, can be obtained by decomposing the huge floating dust in the sky, it can be understood as endless renewable resources. And devices for collecting rainwater and purifying water, as well as equipment for fishing and cooking, can also be manufactured from the start. Therefore, players can easily achieve the demand cycle. Even if they don’t fly around to pick up garbage, they can still be self-sufficient by living on the ship – but only to the extent that they can “survive”. If you want to get new materials and technology, you still have to fly to the ruins in various places to explore.
