Strategy is a staid and somewhat static genre, so it’s always a pleasure to see something come along and jumble it up a bit. As Far As The Eye is a strategy game – it’s about planting a base and gathering resources – but it’s a nomadic one, a Roguelike, and it’s largely pacifist, based on flourishing, migration and survival.
As Far As The Eye at PAX Online x EGX DigitalDeveloper: UnexpectedPublisher: Goblinz Studio, Maple Whispering LimitedPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, Epic)
In it you manage a caravan, starting with a handful of what the game calls pupils – worker units, basically – that must weave its way across several, branching regions of the map, FTL style, to the Eye. Like FTL, too, time is of the essence, with a flood coming for you after a certain number of turns in each little patch of land.
The twist in As Far As The Eye is the style, which shirks the clanking, industrial overtones of most strategy games for one of floating whimsy. The caravan is a great, mammoth-like beast that groans and sighs, the pupils skippy, wispy little waifs. Resources are stored and carried with balloons, harvested from rocks and quarries and forests – because what would strategy be without those – but sumptuously drawn and coloured ones, all crimson and crystal, in a world more alien than most in that it feels genuinely quite new.
As Far As The Eye | GAMEPLAY Watch on YouTube
It does push up against tweeness. But, if you’ll take my hand for a moment and skip with me to the technical bit over here, you’ll find the sincerity needed to back that up. When you arrive in a new area you need to plant the caravan somewhere worthwhile – and fast, given the tide’s on its way – and get gathering. What you need to gather depends on where you’re going next, your choice of destination having a certain cost, in resources or in “knowledge”, another resource earned through the expertise of your pupils.