You can’t rush perfection. So many artists have created their life’s work after decades of toiling in the lab like a mad scientist. But when it comes to video games, a laborious life cycle rarely results in a masterpiece. Due to rapidly changing tech, a game that’s in development for a decade can often wind up dropping as a Frankenstein monster built from the bones of shifting design trends and hardware changes. So it’s a miracle that Faraway, a game that’s been in development for closer to twenty years than ten, lands as a little triumph.
Faraway is the latest game from Steph Thirion, the solo developer behind 2009’s critically acclaimed iOS puzzler Eliss. (It’s published by Annapurna Interactive, the company arguably best-known for publishing offbeat games for wider audiences.) At a distance, Faraway looks like a small project: a high-score chasing arcade game about shooting stars. In reality, it’s a 16-year passion project that has finally come to fruition. Even in its one-button simplicity, Faraway feels like the kind of small-scale masterwork that so often gets overlooked in an industry that increasingly values Hollywood production over expressive gameplay.
Like a classic arcade game, Faraway doesn’t need much explanation. You control a shooting star floating through space in a straight line. When you press and hold the game’s single button while passing by a star, you’ll snag onto it and orbit around it until you let go. That allows you to change directions and build speed as you hurtle through space. You’ll need to master those fundamentals before you get to Faraway’s delightful puzzle conceit: Your goal is to create as many constellations in the sky as you can before time runs out.
As you fly around, you’ll bump into round zones that contain a bunch of stars. Using your orbiting powers, you can connect lines from one star to the next. A constellation is made by linking together as many stars as possible without intersecting with an existing line. You’ll get points for each line segment placed, but you’ll get an added score multiplier each time you create a closed loop of stars. The more complex your constellations, the more points you’ll get. Plus, you’ll add more time to your star’s short lifespan and unlock larger zones that let you make even bigger constellations as a round goes on.
It’s so easy to pick up and play, yet contains so much tricky nuance that begs for mastery. You need to learn how to launch out of an orbit to make sure you don’t bump into a line, or how to make criss-crossing shapes without bumping into any lines. A had a breakthrough early on when I realized that I could create bigger combos if I started my constellations at the center of a zone, giving me room to work outwards and loop shapes together as I worked outwards.
It can be frustrating to learn the ropes, especially as you get used to the fact that you can’t choose which star you stick onto if you’re in a cluster of them, but Thirion does a great job at easing you into the complexity. As you gain higher scores in the main mode, you’ll unlock puzzle missions that ask you to trace increasingly complicated constellations. Those missions will help you practice some tricky maneuvers and learn different shapes you can make with careful thinking. And since they’re doled out to you as your skill increases in the high-score chase mode, it always feels like you’re learning new ideas when you’re ready to graduate and take your game to the next level.
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Faraway is the kind of unassuming design feat that I wish was more valued in an industry increasingly enamored with narrative spectacle. It has the creative spirit of the game designer Jeff Minter’s work, minimalist games like Tempest 2000 that express so much through a focused gameplay loop and immaculate vibes. Like an abstract painting or an experimental film, Faraway has a trance-inducing quality to it that’s so easy to get lost in. It has circled my mind much longer than some of this year’s most thought-provoking narrative games.
Though Annapurna Interactive has a reputation for publishing interactive movies these days, it’s arguably at its best when it’s using its sharp eye to scope out games like this. Faraway joins a pantheon of minimalist triumphs under the label, a class that includes the poetic Gorogoa and unforgettably strange Cocoon. It isn’t likely to get as much awards buzz as a story-forward game like Mixtape, but the soul-nourishing constellation game deserves its flowers for being every bit as expressive by barely saying a word.
Faraway will be released Nov. 5 on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Annapurna Interactive. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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