FAR: Changing Tides story explained

FAR: Changing Tides tasks you with locating a boat and sailing across the world. The game’s story is told mainly through your actions and the puzzles you solve. However, there’s more that the game only tells you through its environments. This guide explains the story of FAR: Changing Tides to help you understand every beat.

From lone scavenger to savior

Your nameless protagonist starts FAR: Changing Tides scavenging a drowned city. The world has experienced a brutal series of natural disasters that all seem to be linked with earthquakes and climate change. Everyone is gone, but it’s not clear if they’re all dead or just somewhere else. The protagonist seems to have a place to call home nearby, underwater close to a large door that they can’t open.

The base seems familiar to the protagonist. There’s a drawing of a large boat on the wall, plans for the machine, but nothing else. The protagonist knows how to pump water out of their home when it seeps in, showing that this is likely where they return after a long day of scavenging. Today is different, though. They walk into the large device at the bottom of their home and are donned with a suit. After leaving through the nearby airlock, they discover that this suit allows them to open the large door, revealing the boat they’ve studied the plans for each day.

After getting to grips with the sail, the protagonist leaves the city they’ve scavenged for so long. They discover a shelter downriver and a sawmill, uncovering a new module that adds an engine to the boat. Just after this, the water recedes, stranding the ship. Soon after, a vast tidal wave appears, and everything fades to black. Thankfully, both the protagonist and the boat are still in one piece.

The next stop on the protagonist’s journey is a huge city built into the side of a mountain. Inside, they find a map showing a route someone had planned to a coastline with an image that looks like a fire. Deeper into the facility, the protagonist discovers huge images that depict civilization’s rise and fall as the environment collapsed and this region of the world was flooded.

It seems the humans of the past had a plan, but all of their drawings and devices come to nothing. As you explore throughout the rest of the story, you uncover their broken machines and protective measures, none of which helped them in the end. For example, a massive wall was built to keep the water out when the world started to flood. When you find it, though, you can sail through a doorway that must have been designed for trains on incredibly high rails at one point.

At the bottom of the ocean, you uncover a massive facility designed to house people in the new flooded state of the world. However, it’s empty. No one made it to the facility, so it sits broken and abandoned, waiting to be activated by someone when the protagonist stumbles across it along their journey.

When you trek across the icebergs at the top of the world, you discover why no one made it to the city. The ice stopped their boats. They sit there frozen in time, their occupants likely just as frozen in their cold metal walls. Under the ice, the protagonist comes across the body of a woman. We assume that this is their mother, as the man you discover in FAR: Lone Sails is the father of that game’s protagonist. The mother still holds the map for the fire in her hands.

The protagonist pushes on, finding incredible machines as they do. They fly on their boat and eventually reach a lighthouse. Inside, they sound a horn and see a fire in the distance. After clambering back onto their boat and sailing over, they meet the protagonist from FAR: Lone Sails, their broken engine in the sand behind them. At least with the boat, they have somewhere safe to stay.