Far Lone Sails

Far Lone Sails is a great little silent game, with simple puzzles and mechanics. It's got some story, and even lore if you look carefully for it, but nothing is forced upon the player. I've played it right after 1000xResist which was an borderline mental violation and Far Lone Sails helped me relax, regain my mindspace and remember that games can still be enjoyable. I used the video of the walkthrough to talk about why I play — to escape reality — and which games do this better and why. This is a loose transcipt of the video with some edits.

Another reality

There are kinds of media that are just an experience, something you perceive for a short while, and then go on with your life. And there are kinds of media that suck you into their world, that let you be fully transported there and live in that another world for some time. Not just a story to be experienced, but a life to be lived. A fully immersive experience which doesn't need VR glasses, not even a moving picture, since books are able to do that as well. But here I will be mainly referring to visual media, such as movies and games.

Far Lone Sails specifically is set on post-apocalyptic Earth, future year unknown, and you play as a tiny character operating an old steampunk looking machine called an Okomotive. Most of the time, it looks like it's about to blow up and fall apart. And if you can't manage it properly, it actually does blow up and fall apart. And then you wake up in your bed at the newest checkpoint. Everything was just a bad dream. You're still going somewhere, and you have no idea where till you finish it for the first time. I ended up playing it 4 times, hunting a speedrun achievement, and in my 3rd playthrough I was too late to get it by only 2 minutes.

Normally, missing something by such a small margin, can easily make someone if not angry, but irritated. But I've been enjoying it so much, that I just launched it again immediately. In the later playthoughs some moments were not as emotional anymore, but it still was immensely enjoyable overall. This is a kind of game that lets you just be there, in its world.

This made me contemplate why was it so successful in doing so, transporting me to another reality? What is it that is needed to be able to leave this world and truly move somewhere else in your imagination? I'll use several games I've played, good and bad, as examples, and a TV show called Pluribus. I will keep them all mostly spoiler-free as I will only talk about their structure and general plot idea.

Setting the stage

So, let's first start with Pluribus. It was actually Pluribus that made me purchase Far Lone Sails in the first place. The main character there, Carol, is a romantic writer and her imaginary universe has ships that sail on sand. This is an eerily familiar image. I think there was a sand ship somewhere in the Pirates of the Caribbean and a funny land Titanic in Futurama series. But I kept wondering if there are indeed full-fledged fantasy series about sand ships. I wasn't interested enough to actually google it. But as I was casually browsing Steam catalog, I ran into this little game. I saw a sand ship of a kind and decided I'll play it between the episodes.

In March of 2025 when I bought and played my very first game after a long time of not playing any desktop games, I was lucky to start with Cabernet which was an absolutely amazing and truly immersive game for me. It's a 2D vampire narrative RPG where you play as a newly turned vampire, Liza. You have zero memory of your past life, and you are given a job as a doctor apprentice in a local town where you can interact with locals and do their quests, making difficult decisions to balance your new lust for blood, and dormant memories of prior life ethics while continuing to coexist with humans and keeping your identity secret.

Nothing in common with Far Lone Sails, very dialogue rich, interaction rich. Yet it was also able to transport me into its world. Thinking of why I hated 1000xResist, I thought that maybe I just can't enjoy games more than 6-8 hours long? That's obviously not the case with Cabernet. A single playthough takes a while, and I did so many, spending an insane amount of over 90 hours in this indie game. Just because I enjoyed being there, living in that world. That's a key.

That is when I made a decision to "move" into the other reality, since the real world seemed just too unbearable to endure. With everything on the news, I decided to just seek imaginary worlds from than on. And live there for as long as they allow. And I will adopt games as my primary gateway to enter those other worlds.

Means of transportation

So what is it about a game or any other instance of entertainment media to be able to take your consciousness and temporarily transport it away into another realm? My first point is that in order to do that, a game or any other media must be able to put you into a trance-like state of mind.

If you ever heard about hypnosis, there's a stage of it called somnambulism. You can tell a person anything and they will do it. Also you can tell them that they are now another person altogether and they will embody that other person for the best of their ability. But to get a person to this state you must hypnotize them first with means such as rhythmic sounds, regular flashes of light, etc. And my point here is that a game has to be repetitive to a certain degree in order to immerse a player into a state similar to hypnosis.

I think that it works especially well for autistic people. We love repetitive routine tasks. They make us relax and let go of inner walls and guards. Managing the okomotive in Far Lone Sails is repetitive. Push the button for the engine. Let the steam out. Watch the fuel. Watch the wind. Watch for obstacles. These simple actions are like ticking of a metronome that lets your consciousness detach from the physical reality and be transported somewhere else.

Repetition is one way to get there, but another important key is focus. To enter the trance-like state, you have to be fully focused. And a very good example of games that keep you focused are combat heavy games, either 3D or 2D. You have to press correct buttons fast enough or you will die. You have to be fully focused and fully alert while playing those games and, as a result, when the action heavy sequence is over, you're already there. You've been transported in. You're the character now. So, you can experience exploration or narrative parts of the game as if these were your own story.

There's one more distinct detail in Far Lone Sail: footsteps of the main character. It's a very cute sound, but more importantly, it's rhythmic. This sound, I'm sure, helped to get me into the trance-like state. 1000xResist, on the contrary, didn't have any simple repetitive routines at all. I'm not even sure if there was a sound of any footsteps for that much of the exploration on foot that you had to do in that game. The main map was just too huge. The scenes and areas were too many. I tried but I never found any ticking of any imaginary metronome to latch on to and jump the realities from here to there.

At the time of the video, 7th episode of Pluribus was yet to be released, and there was a prominent theory about a high frequency rhythm, a sound that glues the hive mind into the collective. Yet again, a note on rhythmic sounds and what they can do to human consciousness.

Destination

We've talked about means of transportation into another realities. But the destination is also important. Where are we going? What should be the core characteristics of the imaginary realm for me to want to live there for some time at least? And one crucial aspect that I can pinpoint is space. There should be enough space in that world for me to breathe freely, literally or metaphorically.

Imagine Far Lone Sails as a 3D game for a moment. If you actually had to be there inside the okomotive, first person view, then all you'd see in front of you would be a big red button, you'd have to turn around, enter the elevator, leave on the correct floor to refill the fuel. You'd hear all those engine sounds from very close and you'd only see outside world when you had a moment to climb on the roof or when you go out to do some quests. I bet this game format, the 3D first person view would not have worked with the current plot. It might have worked as a horror story, especially if you had to fight off zombies along the way, but not this journey kind of story.

The key why Far worked so well for me is space. A lot of space on the screen. While the character might have been confined to close quarters of the old machine, you the player, the spectator, had all the space outside too. You could see the stars, the sunrise and sunset. Huge abandoned structures and remnants of the world long gone. And you were there in that world alone. And you were tiny. So, so tiny in that big vast open world.

I saw some people complaining that the playable character was too small and you could zoom in only a little bit, but not enough to see all the details. But I love games that make you feel no more than a speck of dust in an infinite universe. I love this feeling because that's what we are. We are nothing but tiny specks of dust, each with a tiny warm beating heart floating on a slightly bigger rock in an infinite empty and cold universe.

But that feeling aside, you do not just become this tiny character. You also become the whole okomotive and you get to identify yourself with this old machine as your extended body. There is one very emotional moment in the game where the okomotive runs away from you downhill and you have to chase it in the night, in the wind, feeling suddenly so fragile and unprotected in that huge huge world. That's why the moment in the end of the game where you have to part ways with the okomotive actually hurts emotionally. You're letting go of a part of yourself, shedding your old shell for something new to grow and begin.

Space

Far Lone Sails lets you experience this range of beautiful emotions largely because it doesn't tell you to do that. There is no written directive that you are the machine. No, you're given space to start feeling like that out of your own free will. And that's the main difference between 1000xResist and Far Lone Sails. Why one is unbearable and the other one is soothing. It is the space.

By sticking more and more elements into its narrative, 1000xResist gradually occupies all the available space in your mind. You suddenly find yourself stuck in a confined space with way too many people and their issues. They all behave and feel in their certain way and there just isn't much space for interpretation. You've been gentrified out of your own imagination. Maybe at some other point of life, I would not have enjoyed Far that much. But after my inner space has been raided by that overcrowded story, I needed something especially empty to reclaim it.

Let's now come back to Cabernet for a moment. Did this game have space? Well, there was a town for you to explore and inhabitants to interact with, but the main theme that it had was the freedom of choices how to do this. I love Baldurs's Gate 3, but more as an idea. My personal pledge is not to play combat based games with a focus on killing. So, most of the games that give you a lot of freedom of choice are inaccessible to me. Cabernet was my Baldur's Gate 3. I have never before seen a game that gives you that much freedom to choose whatever you want, simultaneously being free of combat.

That's where my insane amount of hours in this game comes from. Not only did I want to try different choices, but I also wanted to try how these choices would interact with each other. So, it's given me a space of possibilities where I could roam free and face the consequences of my imaginary actions. Much like in the real world.

Another truly choice rich game is Slay the Princess. It's much more violent, but then the consequences of whatever path you may choose, including psychological, are shown with amazing clarity. And yeah, I do not play games where you kill for reward, but I do play games where killing yields unique consequences. In Slay the Princess you are confined to basically the same setting, but you get to explore the vast space of emotions and perception changes due to your actions.

And here I want to refer to Pluribus once again. Some criticism of this show is that it is extremely slow, that seemingly nothing is happening. I love that so much. And precisely because of the idea of space. Vince Gilligan, creator of Pluribus, is famous for his iconic scenes with characters engaged in absolutely mundane actions. And this gives the narrative a lot of space to breathe and enough space for you, a viewer, to enter this imaginary world and live within it, should you be inclined to do so.

Aside that, Pluribus has got some truly trance inducing scenes of all the humans joined into the hive mind acting together in unison. That's the trance again. This show has drawn me into to such an extent that one night I saw a dream set in the universe of the show which has literally never happened to me before. Maybe after binging five seasons in one sitting, but not while watching something for just one hour in a whole week.

The point I'm making here is that the space for the narrative to breathe, an open space for interpretation, and the space to fill with your own choices is a key to creating truly immersive worlds where you'd love to live for some time. Not overly scripting everything, letting the viewer or player fill in the gaps with their own imagination, providing enough space for them to exist alongside the characters and not be suffocated.

Story types

To conclude this essay I'd like to talk about plot types. In the theory of storytelling, there is a list of type that all stories fall into. These are roughly:

1.Overcoming the monster, where hero defeats a villain, which is possibly one of the most common basic plots of video games, especially combat based.

2.Rags to riches, growing from poor to rich, which is probably closer to building and management games and nearly every sloppy pay to win match 3 game there is.

The following plots are more pronounced in point-and-click adventure games:

3.Rebirth, a villain reformed, or protagonist redeemed

4.Quest, hence the name of the genre, a journey to find something, be it an external object or an internal revelation.

5.Comedy.

6.Tragedy.

These appear more rarely in their pure form in video games, more in movies or series. Sucker for love definitely was a comedy but also a quest, a quest for a smooch or two.

And finally, there is one more story type. The seventh one which holds especially dear place in my heart is:

7: A journey to a strange land and back. In games, it's more often either coming back from a strange land or just traveling there. For simplicity sake, I'd refer to these story types as just a journey.

Journey

Journey type of games are definitely platformers. The essence of a journey, constantly walking, moving, having to reach somewhere. Far Lone Sails is a journey type of story, too. My absolute favorite, A Highland Song is a journey kind of story where you have to cross the mountain range and reach the sea.

A Highland Song in particular gives you such a vast space to explore and total freedom to go anywhere you'd like. It tells its story, a piece by piece as you roam those majestic mountain ranges of Scotland. It never imposes anything on you and in the end you keep wondering, is it even real? What is reality after all?

The idea itself that you have to travel to a lighthouse by the sea, the sea you've never seen before in your whole life is a very powerful image which speaks to a lot of archetypes inside us. A lighthouse, a beacon of hope, a promise of a better tomorrow, the sea, the vast open living space.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the true nature of our minds is often compared to the ocean, the vast, immeasurable ocean, which may be turbulent on the surface, but is completely still and calm at the bottom. Just think of this feeling that you experience when you escape from the confined space in between huge pieces of rock and suddenly see all that vast immeasurable openness of the ocean in front of you.

This is going to be a spoiler for Far Lone Sails, but you actually go to the sea there also. And in the final sequence, you will light a fire, a signal, and you will hear that your presence has been acknowledged and someone is coming. You won't be alone anymore.

It's a spoiler, but to my opinion, it doesn't spoil much. It's okay to know where you're going. And that's why each new playthrough of Far Lone Sails can be just as nice as the first one. A glimmer of hope, a promise of a better tomorrow. A transformation instead of the same character regurgitated all over again and again and again and again.

That's what the current reality is lacking. And that's the world where I'd like to be. And I love games that let me live in that better world, if only for a moment.

This is the point where I'd like to stop, and suggest you to just go and enjoy the game. The video will be embedded at the end of the page, followed by the links to all the works of media I've referred to.

Thank you for reading and let the light of hope always shine upon your journey. Quoting A Highland song and an old Scottish prayer: «Let the spirit be with thee on every stream, every step of the journey thou goes»