Far from Noise 9+

What a beautiful story. I very much loved this game, very relaxing and calming. The one thing I wish it had was opposing dialogues though, a lot of what the character dialogue choices meant the same thing. Which is probably staying true to the character but doesn’t give much creative liberty to the person putting themselves in the characters shoes. For instance I would have continued to stargazing scene for longer. Or with the badger, it was a good lesson, I just wish the character would have fully been able to change her mind about the badger. Great game though, beautiful art and a nice pace. It was nice how we could pause the game.

If you’re looking for a game, this is not it. I found it heated my phone as someone else commented, and the interaction is minimal, and I would guess that there are not multiple “endings” to be had as there are in “choices” games. But this is not a game. In my experience “playing” through, this wasn’t the point.

I found the whole experience to be profoundly allegorical. I found metaphor after metaphor in the discussion between the driver and his environment. I’m sure I missed some as the authors have shown admirable restraint from making every sentiment explicit. While I wouldn’t call the characters complex, the ideas and perspectives were often immediately relatable. The characters are clearly not the point, but rather the story they act in and the existence they discuss. The narrative also forced some perspectives that initially felt more alien (irrational fears of material creatures primarily) but was able to bring things back to this space of relevance without fail.

This is a well tailored piece of art that very successfully resonated with my philosophical side. I feel no need to immediately replay it, but I am very much looking forward to discovering how I relate to the journey a year or so from now when it crosses my mind to rediscover it. To the developers: thank you for a wonderful experience. I wish I could articulate my thoughts and feelings as well as you have in this piece of art.

First and foremost, this is a promising experience (You’d be hard-pressed to call this a game) - but a couple of fundamental issues exist that prevent me from enjoying the narrative. These are as follows:

1) On my iPhone SE, playing for any length of time makes my phone REALLY hot, for a game that demands time and patience to experience, this is a bit of a deal breaker. Turning on low graphics in the options menu helps this slightly.

2) In the scene with the frog and the turtle, I can tell (from the dialogue) that the turtle is supposed to take the frog on a taxi ride; however in my version the pair just sit statically, doing nothing, while the dialogue ticks on. Hmm.

At point “2” I turned the game off since I then couldn’t be sure if I was missing anything or not. A shame, because this entirely ruined the pace and experience of the journey.

I would definitely want to finish the game, but with some animations or sequences clearly not working - I can’t see the reason to bother.

In conclusion, this is a beautiful and novel (no pun intended) idea, but one that needs to work smoothly to be articulated properly - which was not the case for me. In such a carefully executed app, any break in the narrative utterly damages the experience. It’s a shame, because I am at a point in my life not unlike the woman in the game, on a precipice between life and death. I was hoping this game would provide some context, or comfort - but it was unable to.