Living my life as a Mother Fox on the Run – Endling Review

Developed by Herobeat Studio, Endling – Extinction is Forever is a survival game where you play as a mother Fox as you try to survive a world ravaged by mankind, and here are our review on the game.

Experience the Extinction

In Endling – Extinction is Forever, you play as one of the last remaining mother fox, facing the dangers of being extinct on this now ravaged and polluted Planet Earth. After a feeble and desperate attempt at escaping a forest fire and unfortunately sustaining an injury after falling from a cliff, you have to make shelter and keeping your four newly birthed cubs safe, as you try and avoid extinction of your species.

Endling showcases a peaceful life of a mother fox as she finally has a family. But that all comes crumbling down as one day, a hunter manages to bait and capture one of the cubs out of the shelter.

The real story starts as our mother foxes wakes up to a rude awakening as she realises that one of her cubs is missing. Facing dancer in every corner, our mother fox has to explore the world and try to save her missing cub, at the same time keeping herself and her cubs safe during the journey.

The Haunting Beauty of a Deceased World

The outside world is full of danger, where industrial buildings and human settlements plague the world.

I personally think that the game successfully portrays the overall environment design with the way they put in a lot of atmospheric props like chopped trees, dirty rivers filled with trash, the smoke coming out from factories that pollute the air and the constant reminder that no animal is safe from being hunted.

Some may say that it’s an extremely sad sight, but I see the beauty from that sadness as the game tells a story of a mother and her cubs trying to live out their lives. It’s like a way of expressing that, whatever hardships you may face in life, you are not alone in this struggle.

Endling features 3D environments and models but plays as a side-scroller game where you can only follow linear routes. But that doesn’t mean you won’t get lost from exploring this vast and haunting world. But fortunately, there’s a map button that the developers implemented into the game where players can easily access at any point in time when playing the game.

While the world might be relatively big, there isn’t much you gain from exploring it since there isn’t that much point of interests other than some important events and interactable spots, which can lead into a somewhat lackluster experience overall.

Although, I do think that’s because the exploration that’s available in the game is largely from you just trying to survive by finding food and not trying to die.

You may think that since the main goal is trying to find your missing cub, you might be able to stumble some clues here and there if you were to go out of your way and explore every nook and cranny, but that’s unfortunately not the case.

With the linear progression that the game has, and factoring in the very limited things that you can do in a day due to the time cycle feature in the game, where you and your cubs need to go back to your shelter before entering a new day. There’s some points in the game where you can’t really progress as much as you’d like with all the routes still being locked, which can be demoralising if the only thing you can do in a day is to feed your cubs.

One of my main gripes of the game is probably the amount of backtracking you have to go through which can get tedious, especially in the earlier stages of the game where you constantly have to go back to your shelter which might be really far away from your current position.

Although, looking past the gripes of the game, I do really enjoy how the world constantly changes every day so it always feels like no two days are similar. Some of the examples being the big events like an electric tower falling down on top of our shelter, and how there’s this wild Badger being trapped in a hunter’s cage, where the game lets you save them.

The moment with the Badger is my personal favourite in the game. Before the incident, the Bagder was originally hostile to player when you try to get close to their shelter, but after saving them from the hunter’s cage, the Badger softens up to our cubs and even give the food.

Granted, the Badger is still hostile to the mother fox, but I believe this plays a part of adding in immersion to the game by keeping it somewhat realistic to how real life nature would be in. Being able to forge relationships with different species by having each other backs in order to survive in this brutal environment is a really beautiful thing to experience.

Only One Rule in Nature. Survive.

Survival is the most important thing in the game, especially with the responsibilities of being the last mother fox who is trying to protect her cubs.

While nature is harsh, the game is relatively forgiving since you only have to go out and find food. Not to treat this task too lightly though because it can be rather challenging at times since food resources can be hard to find at times with how it’s constantly changing just like how the world is. One of the example being how the rabbit that you find in a specific spot won’t be there anymore the next day.

You have to keep your wits as you go out and explore and find something eventually. Whether it be hunting animals or picking up wasted food from the trash, you’re guided by the scent trails with a green indicator.

Being on of the rarest species in this world makes you an extremely easy of being hunted. But funnily enough, the game is really easy when it comes to avoiding danger because the human hunters are really slow and doesn’t really feel like they’re trying to chase the player.

But those are just the human hunters, a predator like a big owl can still be pretty dangerous, but you can still easily avoid them by just trying to sneak around them a little since they are always fast asleep.

The list of trouble grows as every human that spots you will only target the mother fox, so you don’t have to worry too much about your cubs, whether it’d be for better or for worst. Though on the flip side, animal predators only target your cubs so you need to get into a habit of remembering which enemies target what.

While your cubs are extremely vulnerable at the beginning of the game, they do get new skills that can help out the mother fox to survive. Some of those skills include squeezing through small gaps or holes in the ground, which can lead to new food sources.

Initially, I would be afraid that the cubs would be too vulnerable, but these cubs are pretty independent, so you don’t have to constantly worry about them. You’ll be able to move as far away as possible and often times, they will always manage to catch up to you. Which to me is a nice surprise since most other games would normally force you to always stick close to the target when doing escort/follow type gameplay. (I’m looking at you Fallout: New Vegas)

The Verdict

One of the strongest aspect of Endling is its story telling through its environmental  design of capturing the perfect image of a devastated world based on real-world exploits. In terms of gameplay mechanics, I personally preferred that they would polish a bit more on the survival-focused gameplay to give a more intense feel by giving the players a more responsibility when it comes to surviving these forsaken lands.

The enemies in the game aren’t as challenging as I’d hope it would be, to the point where my only worries of survival is through finding food, which is a lot easier the further you progress into the game where your cubs get access to those skills which opens up a lot of new food sources.

If you look pass all of my gripes with the game, I still believe the game has so much charm to it and it’s heartwarming to see that the developers put in a lot of effort and thought to the world-building aspect in order to  create this beautiful adventure.

If you’d like to check out more about Endling, you can do so by checking out Herobeat Studio’s Twitter page.

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