Weekend with Indies: Far From Noise

We’re scraping the bottom of the bank account again with the return of Weekend with Indies! This time I’ve taken a look at a game that has intrigued me for a while now: a little endeavour by the developer George Batchelor called Far From Noise.

Far From Noise is a visual novel about having a quiet conversation, but it has elements of an adventure game too, with different dialogue boxes leading to different responses. It’s also a bit of a strange one, as the protagonist is a 20-something year old young woman trapped in her car as it teeters over the edge of a cliff.

She also passes the time by chatting to a nearby talking deer.

Okey dokey.

George Batchelor, 2017

In what has become a typical design philosophy for games like this, Far From Noise follows a minimalist style in terms of artwork and user interface and input. The entire game can be played using only the d-pad on your controller, making it highly accessible from a design standpoint. Indie games are often made on incredibly tight budgets, which means that this minimalist approach may not make for a compelling environment, but it allows the player to become engrossed in the story, and, in this case, the music, which is wonderfully meditative and calming.

Overall the presentation is wonderful; care has been taken to make sure that the low-poly assets are joined by spikes of visual activity. The sun slowly dips below the horizon, bathing the scene in wonderful red, orange, and purple light. Birds circle out over the ocean. Butterflies and, later at night, fireflies flit around the car and the deer as the conversation continues. The whole scene could have been a dynamic screensaver, designed to absorb the stresses of life.

This is something the conversation touches and evolves into. We learn that the young woman drove out to the cliffs to dwell on the possibility of leaving university, feeling as though she is not cut out for it. The options for dialogue vary between the pessimistic and avenues that hold far more optimism. The young woman is hopeful that she will get out of the car, but also believes that her time on this world is up and that she has nothing to show for it.

Whilst some of the characterisation and dialogue is great, a lot more of it feels forcefully humorous and, honestly, a bit pandering. Elements of the player characters language and jokes feel as though they have been ripped straight from Tumblr and online conversations, not physical ones. But then this is a narrative about dangling over a cliff discussing your insecurities with a talking deer, so who’s to say what is real?

George Batchelor, 2017

The deer, too, feels as though some lines are forced, although this is to do with it becoming almost overly philosophical and rhetorical. Subjects can go from a family holiday to nihilistic transcendentalism in a blink of an eye. It means well enough, and I love that Far From Noise lists its inspirations as being the works of Muir, Emerson, and Thoreau, I think the game has approached such topics in a bit of a ham fisted way.

Perhaps this is because the deer is meant to be an allegory for the player characters subconscious, especially due to the way the subjects flow. The repeated acceptance of death and recounting childhood memories of family holidays and stargazing at the cliff edge works very much like the fragmented way in which our minds work in stressful situations.

In short, I don’t know what to think about Far From Noise. The narrative comes across as a well-meaning appeal to those who need to take a step back, be calm and reflective, and embrace life’s lack of meaning. But at the same time, the themes and their presentation come across as incredibly art-school, and certain segments of the conversation left me feeling impatient and bored. Not disappointing, but not one to rave about either.