Forever Skies review: "A refreshing take on the post-apocalyptic survival genre"

I'm terrified of falling in Forever Skies. Below me lies several thousand feet of poisonous air, just waiting to gobble up my body with its lurid green toxins. But here I am, carefully traversing what remains of an aerial wind farm, looting abandoned lockers for motherboards and helium canisters to ferry back to my airship. I'm always grateful when I discover an old tin of food that's no doubt long past its sell-by date – it'll do in a pinch to stave off starvation for another few hours. 

In between perilous trips, I'm thankful for the safety my airship brings as I move to the next forgotten outpost, watching the green air swirl beneath. But, even here it's dangerous too. Intense thunderstorms are a regular hazard, striking my airborne home and causing damage that I will later have to patch with what looks like gum. Swarms of giant moths have also made their homes amongst the green plumes, and it's quite the sight as I move past windows while fixing up a snack.  

Like most survival games, Forever Skies is initially all about the basics. Existing in your floating home requires a constant scavenging for food, water, health kits, and crafting materials that  allow you to research and fabricate ways to make your life in this alt-future Earth a little easier. Naturally, survival only becomes more challenging the further you push into the world. 

Scavenge to survive

Despite the various ever-present dangers, Forever Skies is a slow burn by design. Prepare to spend a lot of your time exploring and looking for the various oddities that you'll need to progress. It's an oddly calm experience, existing in the literal forever skies; often beautiful at times too, as the sun sets against all that green. However, Forever Skies is not a sedentary experience. You'll still have to fuel your engines, scoop resources from floating bubbles of synthetics and metals using a laser beam, fish for moths to make dubious-looking food items, distill lurid rainwater into drinkable liquids, and complete other similar activities in an effort to see out another day.

There's a scaling complexity to the items that you're able to construct, and it's not always clear what (and when) you should be crafting to progress. But enough poking and prodding at the different machines will always yield results eventually. Besides, you are always rewarded when you venture somewhere new too. Getting to these different locations is a case of meandering a slowly-expanding airship to different beacons – pulses glimpsed through rain and dust. There are remnants of old bases, touches of those who came before, papers to read, and new recipes to discover. Resources must be mined, and items scanned, to get the most out of every expedition. 

While the Forever Skies story is intriguing enough – a lone scientist returns to Earth long after an ecological catastrophe has left the planet uninhabitable – but for me the real reward is base building. You get access to the 'Shipbuilder' early on; it's a sort of gun that lets you bolt new elements onto your ship like extra rooms, windows, and catwalks if you've got the right materials to spare. By exploring and scanning discovered locations, you'll unlock more options for improving your ship too. This allows you to bring more personalization to the expedition: You could invest in the physical elements of your ship, or increase the amount of weight that can be carried, or its capacity to fly above (and deeper into) the poisonous green. 

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My only gripe at this stage surrounds navigation. As far as I can tell, I can't mark anything on my radar, and although Forever Skies tracks where you've come from during flight, trying to get a sense of what you've done and where you need to head back to next is tricky. That's particularly true of the narrative beats, which involve finding specific resources and discovering new areas to progress. At one point, access to an area required further inflation of my ship's balloon, so I navigated away to find more helium, only to completely lose track of where I was initially trying to get to. I found an alternate option eventually, but it was a frustrating moment that made me feel like I'd missed something. 

I'm also enjoying the fact that, for now, Forever Skies is free of combat. It adds to the sense of calm that permeates throughout this survival experience – much like the early hours of No Man's Sky or Subnautica. There are dangers and hazards, but they are natural, and it's refreshing to move through this sort of world and not have aggressive creatures of constructs taking swipes at you. This is likely to change as Forever Skies navigates early access, with developer Far From Home outlining its intention to introduce combat as part of its refreshingly clear and upfront flightmap for future updates. Still, I'm not convinced Forever Skies needs anything more lethal than it already has – its joy is drawn from building your ship, exploring a broken world, and discovering the mysteries concealed beyond the dust. 

Other confirmed upcoming features include more airship expansion and customization options, along with gardening and four-player co-op, and these all make the future of Forever Skies look very bright indeed. Should you decide to jump in now, Far From Home is already offering up over eight hours of story, and then there's the countless hours you could spend exploring the skies and working on your ship. Forever Skies is a really awesome addition to the genre, and one I can't wait to see where it goes from here. 

Forever Skies was reviewed on PC, with code provided by the publisher