Look at this world! When the clouds roll in, when the sun ignites the tips of the waves that roll and thunder and boom underneath you. Look at this world, when you arc in close to an island freshly delivered out of the mist and you see rickety bridges, broken temple spires, bundles of sticks lost to the froth and surf. Look at this world when you race up and the sky is everywhere, shifting from pearly dawn to burning dusk. Look at this world when you scud over the top of breakers and a whale erupts from the water and splashes back into the deep.
Before I play The Falconeer, I have a half hour chatting to its pretty-much-one-man-developer Tomas Sala over Skype. He looks breezy for someone who’s just had a baby. In fact, perhaps breezy isn’t quite right. There is a glorious mania here as he tells me about his last few weeks, but also about the world he is making in a back room filled with baby toys, about the bird he has made and the landscape it travels through. Cultures! Factions! Lore! I’m a lore guy, he says, and I believe it. He wants to show me the basics of this game, which is an aerial dog-fighting RPG affair set in a richly detailed fantasy world. But he also just wants to talk about what he’s doing, I think. This game! This game is made of love. It is so obvious. Everything he tells me reminds him of something else he wants to tell me. Characters. Missions. Mechanics. Nested campaigns! A map of a world that takes a long time to travel across! The politics and customs!
This is what I love too, of course. A game that comes from a place of sheer passion. And when I play the build myself – a starter island, make a character, get up into the sky! – that passion is everywhere in the detailing, the extraneous flourishes, the sense that one thing leads to another and to another and there is no end to the invention.