Endling – Extinction is Forever (Xbox Series X)
In the games Shelter and Shelter 2 you play as an animal trying to ensure the survival of her children, the emphasis being mostly on the dangers of the natural world. Endling – Extinction is Forever focuses on a similar concept, but this time it also includes the unfortunately present hand of human influence on the difficulties its fox protagonist would face in trying to raise her kits. As its title implies, this survival game does not hold back in portraying the negative environmental impact and how it impacts this particular family of foxes, but perhaps surprisingly it also spares a good deal of time for showing that humans are also often victims, a more robust picture painted of the relationship between man and nature despite it never sacrificing the fox’s realistic perspective.
Endling – Extinction is Forever begins with a forest fire, a pregnant fox mother forced to flee her burning home and finding refuge in the only place available nearby, a den positioned near human facilities like a factory and slaughterhouse. Despite the stress of the situation, she gives birth to four young kits, the player’s goal being to ensure their survival over the next month by hunting or scavenging for food at night while avoiding danger, adjusting to any events in the area, and getting back to your den come sunrise. While most days give you some freedom on where you go in your journeys, your fox can track certain scents, this useful not only for finding food but also tracking a baby that is quite quickly abducted by a scavenger early in the game. The purple scent of this scavenger is key to the game’s storytelling, not only giving you small visions of events that tie to the rescue of your lost child but also helping to ensure you’re progressing into new areas at a steady pace.
As you find new dens and hunting grounds based on the purple scent trail, you’ll start to encounter more of the game’s visual storytelling. No one speaks in Endling – Extinction is Forever, but it’s easy to see how dire the situation in this little slice of civilization has become. Humans in the area need to wear gas masks to filter the air and while there is a brief period where you can explore a thickly wooded area, over the course of a few days you also get to witness it be cut down, your movement options technically expanded as you can cross toppled logs and slip through more open spaces but the resources you depend on start to dwindle. There are humans who will happily hunt a fox if they should come across you, although for some characters it almost feels like part of the food chain, those people clearly struggling as well and not able to turn down the benefits of a potential catch. At the same time, there are kind humans as well, ones who appreciate your presence peacefully or simply are too beat down to acknowledge you. The game will not shy away on the heartbreaking impact industrialization and careless pollution has on every living thing, a fight for survival meaning rather than always seeing an aggressive human as a villain, you come to recognize it’s not that different from when you hunt down rats, rabbits, or pigeons.
Endling – Extinction is Forever definitely benefits from having a clear story path, ensuring that there’s a developing narrative to hold your interest and get across the game’s themes more clearly. It is quite easy to become invested in more than your little fox family, but their survival is still an important element of the game if not one that’s necessarily hard to manage. While the first few days involve carrying food back to your den for your newborns, quite quickly they’re on their feet and accompanying you in your foraging, yet they are less capable than you and quite dependent on you for protection. It’s not too difficult to keep them well-fed surprisingly, even if that involves having to sometimes search trash bags for scraps, but there is true peril and the fact you can have your babies actually die ensures the moments where one is in jeopardy can induce a proper sense of panic. The mother fox is already faster than her kids but can also reach areas they can’t sometimes necessitating moments where you need to briefly leave them on their own or are worried they won’t be able to properly escape whatever danger is pursuing you. Sometimes a routine bit of exploration can sometimes have an unexpected complication like a baby failing to make a jump over a gap or an owl swoops down to try and snatch one of your children away. The mother fox is able to repel even humans that are aiming to get violent, but it’s mostly with one quick attack and she’ll be injured and slowed for a while which makes the escape potentially nerve-wracking. A proper level of caution still makes most dangers manageable, but there still can be those sudden surprise moments like encountering the furrier whose patrol routes of the world are less set in stone than someone like the scavenger.
Endling – Extinction is Forever takes place in one large area where your ability to explore slowly expands across the days, either because you find new lairs to sleep in so you can start from different areas or because you eventually find some badger tunnels that allow for quicker traversal to different areas of the map. You do not move freely, instead following set paths with controls similar to a side-scroller. Finding the optimum path to reach new areas while finding food and avoiding trouble is more the challenge than anything akin to movement-focused obstacle courses though, the game trying to keep some realism in how the fox explores and does things like climb or leap. There is an incentive to explore beyond just finding food as well, your map telling you about certain events available each day. Some of these can be pleasant like a lone guitarist you can relax and listen to while others represent a potential threat and you won’t know until you investigate. The map uses an orange exclamation mark for these events and oddly enough, it also uses such a symbol for areas you can scratch up to throw the furrier off your trail. It doesn’t really cause any harm to have them share an icon, but it would be preferable to have that marked differently since some days have more events than you can reasonably get to. You can operate while the sun is up but it puts you at greater risk of negative human contact, but you also have time to get back to a den even if you lose track of time by it not being a hard deadline.
Over the course of the adventure your little kits will continue to grow, there being a few scenes that show it off rather adorably like when they witness their first snowfall. While even the music will work to ensure the saddest emotional moments land beautifully, Endling – Extinction is Forever makes sure there is enough hope in your journey and quieter moments like this so it is isn’t just a consistently bleak reflection on how humanity has harmed the environment. Your pups will gradually become more capable too, learning from their time with you and even developing unique skills. One might be able to join you in climbing up trees to snatch bird eggs while another instead learns how to dig for grubs, and some of these abilities only develop if you find the right area through your own exploration. Your capabilities will never become too broad though so some of the less eventful days can feel a bit basic, but if not for some quieter moments, you might not have as much time to realize how the world is changing around you and perhaps more importantly, that occasional simplicity can help the unexpected disruptions to land more effectively since they’re not so easily anticipated.
THE VERDICT: Beautiful and heart-wrenching, Endling – Extinction is Forever may not make the actual survival mechanics difficult to manage but still ties your mother fox’s activities to a narrative that shows how environmental harm impacts even the ones perpetrating it negatively. The gradual changes to the areas you explore and the few characters you meet give the game a more structured story to follow while trying to keep your kits alive, and while caution can make that fairly manageable, the threat that a single failure could spell the end for one of your children ensures there are still moments you feel some mortal peril. Exploring remains fairly compelling throughout, so while survival seems less desperate than one might imagine for a game called Endling – Extinction is Forever, you can still feel the emotional plight of those caught in the shadow of industrial greed.
And so, I give Endling – Extinction is Forever for Xbox Series X…
A GOOD rating. The balance of how difficult survival should be is an interesting question for Endling – Extinction is Forever. The strongest element is definitely the story you uncover while following the scavenger’s scent to new locations, the player witnessing the impact of humanity reshaping the land with little care for the impact. If keeping your kits alive was too demanding, you might worry that following the story could put their lives at risk, but with a fairly manageable hunger meter for the whole pack and at least one attack to help repel most immediate dangers to their lives, you can pursue the plot without much fear. The fact the game can kill off a pup though means that even if you don’t often feel in much danger, if a situation does put you on the back foot, you still will feel some sense of appropriate panic. You may be fairly capable, but slip up a little and the loss could be devastating. It’s perhaps better to think of the gameplay as focused more on exploration, that task being guided well by the need to find food or follow a trail that lets you see interesting events or notice the environment’s development over time. You never really need tight control of your fox and even a few sneaking sections are more just about not loosing your cool, your success often more about the choices you make on where to go, which orange exclamation points to investigate, and how you respond to any riskier moments rather than any sort of test of your abilities. Endling – Extinction is Forever isn’t just about the story because of that layer of survival added to it and perhaps the narrative could have landed harder if there were more moments where you might resort to desperate scrounging rather than more routine foraging trips, but the impressive environmental storytelling and the sense of discovery tied to it helps to hold your interest in place of something truly difficult.
Endling – Extinction is Forever has a pretty clear environmental message and isn’t afraid to target the player’s heartstrings directly to help it sink in, but it also isn’t mired in cliches. Rather than choosing to speak directly on the issues, it instead immerses you in the fallout of reckless human development to help the message land better. In fact, there might be something to glean from how survival isn’t always difficult once you realize you’ve had to wade through sewer pipes, eat from trash bags, and outrun hunters to do so. Life is more than mere survival and nature is persistent and stubborn. Even if extinction feels too abstract a threat for some, seeing humans and animals trying to get by in the polluted wake of unchecked environmental destruction should raise the question on why anyone should have to suffer such conditions, especially since Endling – Extinction is Forever makes sure you feel for those caught in such situations by focusing its short but effective narrative squarely on their plight.