Far Horizon

I've spent enough time with small-team open-world RPGs to know the ones that punch above their weight, and Far Horizon is exactly that kind of uncomfortable surprise. BEACHAM Games is literally two brothers, and the fingerprints of a passionate, slightly-overreaching passion project are all over this thing, which is both its biggest charm and its most honest flaw. The setup plants you in a third-person, open-world sci-fi sandbox after your ship gets ripped through a wormhole. From there the game fans out into alien biomes ranging from lush alien forests to crystalline lava fields, each carrying unique creatures and harvestable resources. The loop is familiar: loot, shoot, craft, survive. But what gives Far Horizon texture is the sheer variety of systems it layers on top. You can build autonomous resource-collecting bots, craft turrets and cybernetic upgrades, fire your ship's cannons, concoct potions, close interdimensional rifts, and intercept supply drops. The skills, attributes, weapons, and armor customisation tree is deep enough to support multiple playstyle approaches. On paper, this reads like feature bloat. In practice, most of it actually works, and the early hours carry a genuine sense of discovery. The cracks show mainly in the AI and UI. Enemy creatures behave erratically, players have noted hostile fauna that ignores nearby droids and fixates on you no matter what you do, which undercuts the tension the encounter design is reaching for. The interface, while crisp visually, gets confusing fast once crafting queues pile up and objective tracking falls short of what the scope demands. Community posts also flag small quality-of-life pain points: the lens flare is aggressive, there's no hold-to-fire option on mouse, and the ship navigation layout takes real adjustment time. None of these are fatal, but together they add friction that a bigger studio would have sanded down in a beta patch. What the game earns back is atmosphere and ambition. The visual fidelity is legitimately striking for a two-person dev, and one reviewer compared the first impression to Mass Effect without the dramatic overhead, which is about as high a comp as indie sci-fi gets. The animated intro was noted as among the more memorable in a crowded 2024 releases window. An AI companion named Zeus accompanies you through cave systems and puzzle sequences, and while the AI-generated voice work is a known inclusion (the developers disclosed its use openly for the robot voices and select story elements), it fits the tone better than it has any right to. Steam sits this at a Mixed rating with around 64% positive across a small review pool, which is an honest signal: this is not a polished, all-audiences recommendation. It is, however, the kind of game I find myself quietly advocating for, one where two people built something larger than they probably should have and mostly got away with it. If you have patience for navigation jank, an appetite for dense crafting loops, and some goodwill toward handmade worlds still finding their edges, Far Horizon rewards the curiosity.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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