Author: Rich Meister
Earth or a planet like it (it’s never made explicitly clear) is doomed, so the brave scouts set out for the Wyld of the Farshore. It’s not a new idea, but Jett: The Farshore presents it through a fresh lens and some interesting layers. Tor is a mysterious mountain that calls out to these desperate few from across the stars like a signal beacon via the Hymnwave.
See, the people of Jett’s world haven’t just scouted a new planet that might make a good home; their spiritual leaders have prophecized it. As the first scout team to set foot on The Farshore, your team has to establish a base camp and learn all you can about the flora and fauna of this strange new world.
Jett: The Farshore (PS5[reviewed], PS4, PC)
Developer: Superbrothers, Pine Scented Software
Publisher: Superbrothers, Pine Scented Software
Released: October 5, 2021
MSRP: $29.99
You play as Mei, the Mystic amongst these scouts sent by the religious leaders of your planet, who, despite being a woman of few words, ends up being quite vital to the mission. Jett tells a fascinating story filled to the brim with sci-fi tropes and simultaneously manages to smash a lot of those same tropes. This shouldn’t be surprising coming from Sword and Sworcery developer, Superbrothers.
The opening hours of Jett: The Farshore is filled with discoveries and taking in the beauty of a world beyond the stars. In typical sci-fi fashion, things quickly take a turn as everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the physiology of the planet itself begins to turn on our cosmonauts. Through all of this, Jett manages to strike a solid tone of hope in the face of bleak odds, something that can come off as campy and forced in a lot of instances reads as truly genuine, and the great characters and script are really doing some heavy lifting here.
Every crew member is memorable, and the ability to check in with your co-pilot and gauge your allies’ overall mood through conversation adds a real human element to things.
Gameplay takes two very distinct approaches. The first is more of an overall traditional video game than I would’ve expected from Superbrothers that sees you exploring the surface of The Farshore in the titular recon Jett. You maneuver at high speeds picking up vapor to cool your engine or injecting it yourself to stop from overloading.
Missions see you tasked with everything from hauling equipment to finding unique ways to combat hostile predators, seeing as you arrived with no weapons. These segments are fun and require you to really think about how you can use the environment to your advantage if you want to avoid being knocked about by some of the colossal local fauna. You also have to avoid less tangible threats like the Gloam, a radiation-drenched light that depletes your ship’s shields and will require you to seek shelter for the night.
Once you complete Jett, you can jump back to a spot in chapter three to freely explore the world and complete DataCore entries you might have missed, but I find myself wishing there were a more easily accessible free roam mode. This ecosystem is a wonder to behold, and it often feels like the plot is getting in the way of the player making their own fun with it.
It also would’ve done wonders to give the player access to the Jett’s complete set of abilities earlier on in the game. It can take a good three to four hours before you can really utilize everything at your disposal to make navigation feel good.
When you’re not navigating in your vehicle things snap down to the ground level for more narrative-heavy vignettes of a sort. These moments either see Mei and her fellow Scouts briefly coming ashore outside to discuss their next move or winding down for the evening inside mission control. They primarily serve as exposition dumps but are smartly written and show off some of the great artwork and character models the team put together in greater detail.
If the writing here weren’t so good, it might feel a bit jarring to be sucked from the more action-oriented gameplay into these moments. The two still feel a bit at odds, but they both work on their own merits, and you can’t ask much more than that.
On top of the overall beauty of this world, the rose-colored glow of the planet and arctic circles, the fictional language of our Scout team started to sound downright dreamy to me a few hours in. I might start falling asleep to it soon. There’s a ton of chatter here, too, actually maybe too much.
That’s the issue with a fully subtitled game using a fictional language; my co-pilot never shuts the fuck up. As it turns out, reading line after line of dialogue can be tricky while you’re also attempting to outpace a giant moth and monitor your engine temperature. I can’t tell you how much random exposition I probably missed but let’s hope it was mostly idle chatter.
Jett runs just fine on PS5 for the most part; occasionally, when transitioning from bigger parts of the map, the framerate would significantly drop for a few brief seconds. It doesn’t ruin the experience, but it would be nice to see a patch take care of this hitching.
Verdict: Jett tells an inventive sci-fi story that uses familiar setups to deconstruct existing tropes. The gameplay is fun and snappy, but the rigidness with which it sticks to the larger narrative beats can get in the way of the player finding their own fun. I loved Jett: The Farshore, but a free exploration mode that lets the player engage with the ecosystem in their own time could’ve gone a long way in making it that much better.
Buy it
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher]