Farstrand

After HELIOBANE

In HELIOBANE a gunship flew into Aurel to kill what lived in it. Seven years on, Aurel is still going out and the Concord has about a century to empty its worlds. FARSTRAND is what came after, and a different kind of game: you leave the cockpit for a survey suit and cross six worlds on foot. You don't need to have played HELIOBANE. If you did, you'll know the Umbrine, Old Mott, Cold Harbour and the dead star at Ninth Light, and you'll hear its radio, because glass keeps sound as well as shape. Put a hand on a strand and it plays HELIOBANE's own recordings back.

"We fed it. Do not feed it."

The only road off Aurel's worlds is the one the Umbrine grew, a hive that lives in stars: the strands, threads of umberflesh strung between suns and frozen now into glass. They are slow and rough, and they still carry a ship. Six survey crews rode them out. None came back.

The seventh, the Plumbline, came down on Halm, a cold world under a red sun. Its cartographer, Hesper Lind, woke in a cocoon of glass in a forest of glass. Her left arm was gone at the shoulder. In its place was another, black glass veined with dull gold, and it moves when she tells it to.

FARSTRAND is a metroidvania built around that arm: one person alone in a hostile alien network, a dense map full of secrets, a strange tool that rewrites the world, nine odd guns and a mystery about who she is. It looks and sounds like 1993, with 320×180 pixels, 32 colours and tracker music. It plays like 2026, with coyote time, full remapping and a death that never takes what you found.

The Graft moves heat

She calls the arm the Graft, after the chapter of the Survey manual on grafting fruit trees. It takes heat out of umberflesh and holds it, and it gives heat back. Nearly every lock, enemy and boss in the game answers to that.

Umberflesh has three states: sunfed, flesh and glass. Quench takes a step of heat out of a target. Kindle puts a step back. Quench a flesh enemy and it freezes solid for five seconds: a platform to stand on, and brittle, so a bullet does triple damage to it. Kindle it instead and it turns sunfed for six seconds, moving half again as fast and hitting half again as hard on touch. Kindle a sunfed enemy again and it bursts, hurting whatever is near and breaking plating. Stand close and the burst throws you upward, for a little damage. Walls and plants work the same way: Kindle a bud and a stalk grows across the gap, Quench the stalk and it sets.

The arm holds only so much heat, three pips at the start and nine once you have found all six Heat Cells. Quenching fills it and Kindling empties it, so whatever you give back has to come from somewhere.

A map you draw

Hesper is a surveyor, and the map is her work. It draws the real rooms, not boxes: doors, gates, beacons, anything you have found. A room is pencilled in when you enter it and inked when you rest at a survey beacon. Die before the beacon and you redraw the pencil, though never anything you picked up. The old marks scratched into the glass (an arrow for the way on, a cross for a dead end, a ring where a beacon can go) are the game's hint system, and Options turns them down to the map only, or off.

Six worlds and the roads between them

Every survey beacon went silent at the same place, a tangle of strands the size of a moon that the Survey called the Knot. It is the hub, with a road out to each world.

• Halm: a glass forest over the grown cities of the Halmfolk, under a red dwarf
  
• The Knot: a Concord frigate hangs in the tangle, still playing its admiral's broadcast
  
• Verrin: an ocean under a kilometre of ice, kept warm below by vents
  
• Carcanet: a moon of foundries that the hive wore like a shell
  
• Sunder: a hot world close to a white star, where everything is sunfed
  
• Ninth Light: dead planets stacked under a young sun

Each world keeps a Herald, a shepherd the hive grew there. Most of them slept through the cold. Something warm is waking them. The cold has woken others too: the Worn, whole peoples the hive ate and never finished digesting, their minds still awake in the glass. They are huge, slow and mostly glass, and they want the strands to stay cold, because cold is the only reason they exist. They help Hesper as far as that goes.

Guns, a drone and a trader

Nine guns in three damage types, kinetic, beam and blast. Six are found around the worlds and Old Mott sells the other three. The hive's materials answer each type differently. Natural glass resists bullets and takes extra from beams. Sunfed flesh takes extra from bullets and nothing from beams, which only keep it sunfed longer. Plating takes a tenth of the damage from bullets and beams, and only a blast does full damage; plated walls open only to a heavy blast, such as a Charge Mortar shell or a burst. The Graft changes a target's material, so it changes which gun is right. A frozen enemy under a kinetic gun is the basic combo. Hold the weapon button for a wheel.

Bob is the Plumbline's survey drone, a steel teardrop shaped like a plumb bob. It pings Soundings that find hollow walls, flies through gaps Hesper can't fit and presses the switches beyond them, and in time swaps places with her. Its little readout sometimes says a word. Usually NO.

Old Mott keeps a stall in the Knot and turns up in the other worlds, always somewhere you arrive second. He buys Aurum, the gold-glass the hive drops, and sells integrity patches, a few guns and the occasional heat cell or plate. He calls Hesper kiddo. He won't say how he got there.

Features

• A metroidvania across six worlds, a Herald in each, and a hub to come back to
  
• The Graft: Quench and Kindle work on enemies, walls and buds, and Overfeed bursts a sunfed enemy
  
• 9 guns in three damage types, a weapon wheel, and Aurum to spend at Old Mott's stall
  
• Bob the drone: Soundings, vents, switches, and later a swap
  
• A map that draws real rooms in pencil until you rest at a beacon, with an old-marks hint system you can turn off
  
• Story, Normal and Hard, plus four assists you can switch on one at a time: damage taken, boss telegraphs, hazards, healing drops
  
• 320×180 pixels, 32 colours, tracker music, 60 updates a second
  
• Pad first, built for the Steam Deck: its 1280×800 screen shows the game at exactly four times size, with no bars. Everything is remappable
  
• English, Turkish and Japanese text. The prologue is narrated in all three; Old Mott, Josef Kell and the Worn speak English and Japanese