Endling - Extinction is Forever

Brilliant artistic game (NOT suitable for young children).

This broke me, but is a heartwrenching and beautiful game. Each time I play (I first played on Nintendo Switch), I would feel so accomplished every time I got at least one cub through to the end. Great Game, but may be hard to stomach for sensetive gamers (Me too!!!)

I haven't played the whole game, but I wanted to give some help to this project since I've been following it since the beginning. It's a pretty easy game (at least in the demo) but it is very nice, emotional, and even though it is a 2.5D game, it is woth giving it a chance. Seriously. If you're curious, get the demo and play it.

Definitely not going to be the most helpful review here but thats ok. The line that sold me was "Spend the day resting in an improvised shelter and plan your next movement carefully" I expected something similar to Shelter, Stray, or even Seasons after Fall. Something with an iota of choice and consequence or diverging paths. I expected too much. Its a 90% linear 'story' with virtually no choice/consequence except an arbitrary time limit causing a binary 'decision fork' that brings you to the next linear and similar screen. Hate to say it, but this feels like someone spent way too much time reading those fear based, end of the world forum literature instead of going outside to hug an actual tree or volunteering with actual animals to get a sense of reality. The inablity to jump with the fox is an unforgivable sin. I could have given it 2.5 stars with the propoganda plus the liner story for the graphics. The 30 price tag for 3 hours, the inability to jump, the lack of actual decisions. I'm sorry I wasted my $ on this one.

If anyone knows about Shelter 1 and 2, where you play as animals taking care of their young, this game is a bit like a combination of them, minus most of the charm. The gameplay revolves around taking care of your cubs, feeding and protecting them. One mistake and a cub could die. So the stakes are kind of high and you have very clear incentives. Problem: the gameplay is boring and tedious. While the design is great, the game feels empty and completely monotonous. Many of the design choices make no sense either. The way you hunt, for example. Fishes in a pond endlessly jumping up and down just waiting for you to stand next to them and press a button. If it should be this simple, you could just as well just let the fox catch the fish automatically. Biggest problems: Too much hysteria. Humans burn down forests because so evil brah. Humans make fox go extinct while ROFL brah. Its just retarded. The game claims to bring up contemporary environmental problems but feels more like a fever dream of young Greta. Even worse, the developers themselves try to make money from the hysteria. The "save the world" edition of this game costs about 10 euros more than the standard edition. You get some random stuff included to the base game and a tree planted. The organization that they work with charges 1 USD to plant a tree. This means that 90% of the "save the world" money stays with the game studio. I usually dont care about stuff like that. How some company starts being "green" to make more money. But keeping 90% of the "save the world" money is taking it to another level. Shameful.