Endling - Extinction is Forever Review: it is not afraid to hurt you - The Verge

Endling - Extinction is Forever is a narrative tale about the last foxes on earth and the ravages of climate change. Your heart will get broken, but that’s kind of the point.

In a video game climate that bends over backwards to assure you the cute little creatures you play as or with cannot be harmed, it was shocking to hear the mother fox’s neck snap in Endling - Extinction is Forever. I was running with my trio of kits, trying to escape the murderous clutches of a furrier when he caught me. I struggled as he held me down before I heard the crack of the bones as the screen went dark, informing me I had failed as a mother and that my cubs were going to die. And while I thought that was a little too much, that kind of unflinching look at the reality of survival in a world ruined by climate change is exactly what the developers were going for.

“We wanted to put everything there,” Javier Romello, CEO of Endling’s developer Herobeat Studios, told The Verge. “Of course we have avoided adding violence or gore just because, but in the real world, these kind of things happens.”

In Endling - Extinction is Forever, you play as a pregnant fox that, after escaping her forest habitat that was destroyed by a rampant wildfire, finds refuge near an area populated by climate refugees. There she gives birth to four cubs, and, as their mother, it’s your job to venture out into the blighted landscape searching for food, avoiding danger, and teaching your cubs the skills they’ll need to survive as the last foxes on the planet.

An encounter with the dreaded furrier

    Herobeat Games
  

Endling is really good at creating tension, which is extremely satisfying trying to manage. Early in the game, one of your cubs is stolen. As the days progress with you finding food for your remaining cubs, you pick up the scent trail of your missing one. Scent trails don’t last forever, forcing you to follow them as they appear, but in the meantime, babies still gotta eat.

Foxes are omnivorous and can eat anything from mice and fish to leftover human scraps and berries. But the world you inhabit is a desolate place, and areas where you once found food dry up. One neat thing about the game’s realism is that some food just doesn’t fill your hunger meter all that well, reflecting how climate change can make the food we grow have less nutritional value. I couldn’t find any food save scant bushels of berries that barely filled the cubs’ hunger meter before it got dangerously low again.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/12/23300035/endling-extinction-is-forever-climate-change-review

---