REVIEW – This game has been available on consoles for almost eight months now (it launched on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series), so we are not talking about something brand new. Forever Skies from Far From Home is a base-building survival game that offers three difficulty levels, making it accessible even for beginners. But what can you expect?

It is no coincidence that the word “skies” is in the title, because that is exactly where you will be spending a good chunk of your time – maybe just a little, maybe a lot.

Ship it, whether you like it or not

You do not have to play through the story alone, since you can team up with a friend in co-op. If you do decide to tackle the story solo, be prepared to get bombarded with tasks almost immediately. The lead is no coincidence either (even if it is a line from a song), because you will constantly see and operate a ship. It looks pretty futuristic right from the very beginning, even when it is still quite small in size. After that, you will be visiting abandoned towers. This is how you obtain the blueprints needed to upgrade the ship and how you gather resources.

It is no exaggeration to say that this loop can become downright tedious in the short term, which is surprising given that the game has been playable in Early Access since 2023. There is not much of a challenge here unless you pick the hardest difficulty level. For the most part, your job is simply to keep hunger and thirst in check. Eventually, you will make it down to the surface of an uninhabitable Earth, where oxygen becomes another key factor. Without it, you are done.

You will also have to fight, because aliens and insects will be hostile. Forever Skies only becomes more complicated in the sense that you constantly have to monitor your oxygen level to get out in time, while also keeping an eye on infections. These can cause hallucinations and chip away at your HP, and as the story goes on, your immunity will follow a similar curve. It can be a bit annoying, but we have definitely seen worse. At least it gives you a reason to chase after a cure whenever you have the chance, so that our lonely scientist (or scientists, if you play in co-op) can return to Earth in 2637 and spare humanity from having to live on the Ark space station after the ecological catastrophe.

A virus threatens what is left of humanity, and the pieces of the story slowly fall into place on the surface, as you stumble upon the memories and logs of lost explorers along the way. That is necessary to figure out what actually happened over the past centuries. One thing is certain: Earth, in its toxic form, looks surprisingly striking. With this approach, Forever Skies encourages players to explore, to dig into the backstory, so the whole experience does not just feel shallow and generic.

Beyond the toxic clouds

Even though Forever Skies is set in a post-apocalyptic world, it is full of vivid colors and can be genuinely impressive to look at. You really feel it when you stand on top of a massive structure and look down at the dust clouds and ruins. It is rare to see such an atmospheric sci-fi world that is not fully realistic, but clearly follows its own artistic path. In that respect, it delivers a truly unique experience, instead of the dull gray we have seen in a million other games.

The problem is that performance on PlayStation 5 can be questionable if you opt for Quality mode, because the frame rate cannot always hold 30 FPS. That leaves Performance mode, which in turn downgrades lighting and texture quality. On top of that, some objects clip into each other, and a few textures flicker, so it is far from perfect.

The sound effects are solid, but the music side feels a bit bare. Yes, the silence during exploration does match the mood in a way, but there are definitely moments where some background music would have helped. The world is entirely handcrafted, so do not expect randomness, and that naturally hurts replayability. You can finish the game in less than a day, although the recently released Echoes update tweaks the towers and changes how extractors work. That still does not change the fact that this game is slow to get going, and even though Far From Home is gradually feeding in Echoes content over time, it is hard to say whether these changes will significantly alter the wider perception.

The endless sky

Forever Skies comes across as decent, but not much more, so a 6.5/10 rating feels about right. You constantly have to stay on the move, and the game demands patience from the player. If you walk away from it too quickly, it will never really have a chance to open up to you. Large chunks of the environment feel like missed opportunities, but there are genuinely good ideas in there as well. It could have been better – and in some ways, it still could be.

It is not going to follow the same kind of redemption arc that Hello Games pulled off with No Man’s Sky (which honestly deserves a movie at this point), but it can still offer a fairly pleasant experience.

-V-

Developer: AdHoc Studio
Publisher: AdHoc Studio
Release date: November 12, 2025
Genre: indie action-adventure