Open World Survival With Fargone

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Author: Justin Wood

Justin Wood |

Mar 7, 2023

Back in 2013, a mod for the hyper-realistic shooter ARMA 2 caused me to want to get back into PC gaming. So I saved up some cash, bought my parts, and built my first computer. It was a halfway decent computer but would be laughed at now in terms of graphics card and processor. But when I put it together, I would end up playing around two hundred hours of the mod DayZ. Writing out journal entries for each day my character lived. Something about the game made it feel so alive and cutthroat when it came to coming across other players. You weren’t sure if they were friendly or not, but if you heard a shot ring out in the middle of a town, you knew to be on the lookout and to play it safe as you scrounged just to get by. DayZ has a very storied past with Dean Hall and the mess he brought to the full release of DayZ.

But, ever since then, I’ve always had a soft part of me that genuinely enjoys the open world, survival games like State of Decay, The Forest, and even, in a weird way, PUBG. But part of me has just never been able to go back to DayZ, so whenever I hear about exciting upcoming survival games, I also like to check them out if I can. So this week, when I came across Fargone, I knew I had to dive in.

Fargone kind of just places us in its world with some vague missions, and it’s up to us to survive, which is easily my favorite part of the survival-style open-world games. The caricature design is very much reminiscent of that Money for Nothing Dire Straits song, utilizing early 3d computer animation. So it immediately felt comfortable to me, mixing in its hostile world, trying to kill you at every turn. It was abundantly clear to me that this was my style of game.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics and systems at play in Fargone. For example, if you happen to befriend a community, people inside that community will travel with you and hang out with you. This has the benefit of giving you that extra set of eyes and hands when out in the wild.

Speaking of the wild, you will come across zombies and other human scavengers when you are out and about. While there is little in terms of variety right now. The game is in Early Access, and the developer is putting out updates at a brisk pace. They know they have something fun and special on their hands and are constantly fine-tuning it.

You can feel the inspiration of games like DayZ and Rust, not only its UI but the gameplay loop of looting and scavenging while maintaining your hunger, thirst, and sleep meters. Where this game does have a leg up is that it is a single-player experience. A lot of players turn off open-world survival games based on the multiplayer stylings of games like DayZ, where it is incredibly easy to harass newer players. That won’t be an issue here. Although the addition of a cooperative experience coming later this year is exciting.

The game world itself has enough peppered in through its map to keep things fresh and enjoyable. Being able to take up jobs for resources is an excellent way to keep things pushing forward as well. The gun variety and being able to modify your guns are other nice touches. There really is a lot of good going on with Fargone; that one day, this could be the next big open-world zombie game that many keep returning to.