When the actions of human beings devastate the natural resources of the planet, there is only one mother fox left alive with an important mission: to survive at all costs for her litter. That’s how hard and emotional Endling: Extinction is Forever is.
Whenever we think of the dystopia and in collapse, even through entertainment, we do it under a certain degree of speciesism. After our actions have spoiled the planet, we only care about the direct consequences they will have on us. But the human being, due to his ability to directly influence the climate and nature, is therefore also responsible for the destiny of the other living beings that populate the Earth.
If you play Endling directly, from its perspective of a mother fox caring for her litter, you don’t have to know that you’re the last of your kind. To do this, you have to know that the English term endling means exactly that: the last being of a species that will become extinct when it dies. The subtitle itself helps reinforce this message. We tend to think that there is always a degree of hope, perhaps because stories, whether in video game format or not, tend to do so. But here the message is clear: “Extinction is forever.” After passing the point of no return, there is only the flight forward. That within every being that drives you to continue living, even if nothing matters anymore. It is a disheartening message, but no less real for that. Endling is a cold, faceless emotional wrecking ball, even though she sometimes personifies evil in some characters who, after all that has happened on the planet, still reserve a special place for evil. Our goal then can not be other than to survive. At whatever price. That is the main mechanic of Herobeat’s work.
Endling translates all of this into a simple, yet effective system. As an animal, our needs are not as complex as other games in the genre: we need to eat and sleep. We sleep during the day, avoiding the danger of human beings who continue to deforest and contaminate the last remnants of nature. We face, therefore, not only natural hazards, such as birds of prey that can kidnap our young; also to human beings who seek to make us one last skin. To their traps and also to their garbage.
Until sunrise
When I began to understand Endling’s approach, I understood that I was going to have a very bad timeWhen I began to understand Endling’s approach, I understood that I was going to have a very bad time. I decided to be very careful, since the possibility of losing one of your pups is very real and the loss of him will be felt throughout his adventure. The game takes care that you are aware of this and creates a system that fights against the impatience and haste that have invaded our environment. In the face of all those fast-paced games, Endling rewards caution and attention to this harsh environment. Go too fast and you could end up in a snare, have one of your children killed by an owl, or fall right into the hands of man. The greatest enemy of all, however, is the hunger. A relentless stick to which, luckily, none of my puppies succumbed. I don’t know if I would have been able to continue playing if it had been like that.
Endling unfolds with a very interesting scenario. under a perspective in two dimensions and the possibility of changing it by accessing alternative paths on the Z axis, create a map complex enough to accommodate risk and reward. It is a very functional system and the curiosity of the player always comes into play, who wants to know what lies beyond the shelter. Be careful, because curiosity killed the fox.
Although interesting, it is not perfect. This is where Herobeat I think has most felt the need to constrain actions and events to dose them in the calendar instead of offering more agency to the player as in other survival games, where the fuel of the plot is the discoveries of the player according to their pace of play. For this reason, they have preferred to literally lock some points on the map and be the ones who decide when they open. Similarly, one of the objectives of our mother fox will be sniff a very important scent which, if I’m not mistaken, seems to have the predetermined days in which the trail is renewed.
Perhaps for all this it is easy to err on the side of caution and not venture excessively if you want to save the entire litter. As the setting expands and becomes more complex, new enemies come into play to watch out for, but it’s true that I haven’t necessarily had to go into the most dangerous places to survive. Another questionable point has been the constant and obligatory consultation of the map in order to plot the course. Perhaps it would have been a good idea, just as the game marks the path to your refuge when the night ends, to be able to place custom markers so that the action (and the tension) is not interrupted by these frequent consultations of the game map.
The set is reinforced by a visual style that does its job in a very successful way, not only through clean and stylized graphics, but also through its backgrounds. If the path of our fox mother follows the lines drawn by the map, the story does so in the spaces between those lines. The best moments are when the stage is transformed and we see the direct consequences of the hand of man: a lush forest becomes, overnight, a wasteland of abandoned stumps that has lost all its magic and protection.
Evil, redemption and even goodness, beyond all hope, are some of the themesThe animations, both of the animals and of the men, are very well achieved and they are capable of transmitting what is not meant by words. Not only because our protagonist is an animal, but because, in the face of this collapse and this degeneration, there is nothing left to say. Only silence and actions that speak louder than words. You notice it in the behaviors of the human beings you meet on this twilight journey; evil, redemption and even goodness, beyond all hope, are some of the topics the game tackles without a single line of dialogue.
Endling is tough and a highly recommended title. You have to approach him with enough caution, as you approach a This War of Mine, for instance. Knowing that you are not facing one more work that will leave you satisfied, but emotionally touched. It does not intend, however, to deceive anyone, since the title of the game is totally clear. “The last of your kind. Extinction is forever.” At least, thanks to the fact that the video game is a great tool to simulate extreme situations, we can learn from its consequences before suffering them on our skin.