The Faraway Land Review – Not Enough Open in This World

In the relatively shallow sea of survival craft releases, The Faraway Land emerges as a new title, hoping to be your pick for a cozy, lazy Sunday playthrough. Although I quickly realized this title wasn’t for me, it certainly has its merits, creativity, and clear developer passion. While not meant for me, there’s certainly something in here for fans of the genre to enjoy, though unfamiliar newcomers may want to look to other titles.

The Faraway Land opens with a relatively in-depth character creator, which fans of the genre will undoubtedly appreciate. While not the most varied options for hair and beard styles, a wealth of color options allows you to express yourself in making your avatar in this new world. In particular, the game seems inclined towards making elvish characters, from the drow to the high-elf variant and everything in between. This was the path I chose for my first character, which I continued to select each time I restarted.

Entering the Faraway Land (or perhaps another land entirely) immediately sets your adventure’s tone. you’ll immediately be met with a small pixelated totem to guide your path. I couldn’t tell what this creature was meant to be, but it immediately made your goal abundantly clear. You find yourself in a trial realm, tasked with five tests to complete before ascending to another land to vanquish an evil creature.

That’s a lot to take in, especially when you don’t have a single crafting recipe to your name just yet. To get started on this seemingly gargantuan task, you must leave the shrine area and speak to another friendly, fledgling adventurer who can show you the ropes.

Right away, The Faraway Land commits what is, in my book, the cardinal sin of survival craft games, which is locking recipes (and, therefore, progression) behind the competition of quests. Essentially, this subverts the open-world nature of the game and disincentivizes exploration, locking you behind a very linear quest progression in order to build any of the necessary ingredients for survival.

While The Faraway Land clearly wants to take a more narrative-driven path, I find this to be a big nono in any survival game. If the developers wish to incentivize meeting the game’s many characters, there are plenty of more effective means to do so without gatekeeping our progression. Simple fetch quests that reward rare materials or gold are a good way to make players want to speak to NPCs and also sets them out to learn how to craft the required goods to complete the quest in a far more organic, exploratory way.

Another issue I quickly took up with The Faraway Land is the length of the day/night cycle.

Of the roughly five hours I spent with the game before I called it quits, about two hours were spent on day one. This is, admittedly, because I found myself having to restart the game at one point to complete an early quest, which is an issue I could have avoided if the game didn’t tie progression behind quests and had a faster day/night and growth/regrowth cycle.

See, one of the quests required me to turn in cooked fruit gathered from a local plant, but it didn’t specify that the fruit had to be turned in. It said I had to “place” the fruit, something I struggled to figure out how to do for a while. After giving up and eating the fruit, I finally realized that I had to hand the fruit to the quest giver and quickly scrambled to find replacements.

Unfortunately, none of the plants around me had any more fruit to give, and despite how far I roamed, I wouldn’t find more.

Another issue with the game is the scarcity of basic resources. I quickly ran short of grass, nettle, and fruit while struggling to find more, no matter how much I explored. Stone and wood were in abundance only due to the sheer drop rate of material from one node, which also were sort of hard to find.

The game seems to want you to focus on planting and harvesting resources in a renewable farm rather than plucking new objects from the environment. It seems to force a focus on this by making it hard to find fresh materials after your initial pickings. I can get behind this, but the fact that so much progression is linearly locked behind quests can make it hard to get to the farming segment of the game before you learn the hard way the value of your gathered materials.

Lastly, the game fails in two ways that are really important to me: combat and looks.

Combat in the game is overly basic, lacking even the simple combos found in games like Minecraft. There is a little depth, with the different tools you use being more effective against armored or unarmored enemies based on which you’re using. The game seems to focus on ranged combat via crossbows, which is a sort of refreshing direction for a game like this, but it still doesn’t provide enough depth to be interesting.

Personally, the game’s overall aesthetics, particularly the 3D pixel look, didn’t appeal to me. The whole 3D pixel look never appealed to me, and I find the isometric camera also fights a lot of the game. If you’re going with that camera angle, you should use it to present big, interesting landscapes, which it doesn’t. I also had some trouble with huge parts of the map not loading when I approached; a different camera angle may have helped hide that.

While not for me, the game isn’t without passion. There are depths to its crafting and planting systems, such as having to filter water, which can make it very interesting for a dedicated survival craft player. Interesting environments and tons of exciting characters also abound in The Faraway Land, though I wish the game guided you a little less when it came to finding them.

The Faraway Land was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! The Faraway Land is available on Steam.