Farewell North

Perhaps the most I've ever cried playing a video game.

Farewell North, a game where you play as a dog. Image credit: Kyle Banks/Mooneye Studios

Farewell North is a profoundly, spectacularly emotional game. Normally if a piece of media makes me cry, I shed a few polite tears, dab my cheeks with a tissue, and move on. Not this game though: Farewell North’s climax had me fully scrunched up face, nose running, eyes red, shuddering breath crying. It’s one of those cases where, just because you can see it coming a mile off doesn’t make it hit less hard. I am going to try and avoid explicit spoilers here aside from in one paragraph that I will flag at the start, but you may be able to guess what happens after reading.

You play as Chesley, a border collie, but the main character of the game is your owner, Cailey. She accompanies you as you make your way on a grand adventure through a world inspired by the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Canoe between skerries and islands to relive Cailey’s memories of growing up in the isolated far north, remember song lyrics, sit on benches, and explore solitude.

Cailey moved away from the highlands as soon as she could, seeking the vibrancy of the mainland and Scotland’s capital. Her mum stayed in the north as a shepherd with Chesley as a working companion. Her mum gets sick, and Cailey returns to the area to keep up the shepherding duties for a month or so, waiting for a recovery that never materialises. After her mum’s death, Cailey has no choice but to take Chesley back to Edinburgh. The game takes place some years after this as Cailey makes one last inevitable trip to say farewell to the north.

Chesley rests on a bench. Image credit: Kyle Banks/Mooneye Studio

Cailey’s world is bleak and dark with all the colour sucked out of the environment. Since going back to university and starting to look more closely at things, I have really become fascinated with how media conveys grief beyond scripts and actions. The desaturated colours and grey palate are really effective at conveying a sense of overwhelming grief, the sort that does make the world drab. Chesley can bring colour back to Cailey’s world, briefly, and so can canoeing. But as beautiful and bright and vibrant as these moments are (usually after reliving a memory), they are temporary – drops of glorious life in an ocean of sadness, colouring just a small wisp of water before being diffused in the gloom. The tenderness of the game highlights how personal a story this must be to Kyle Banks, its creator.

And there are so many moments of tenderness. You as Chesley have to engage with small puzzles and challenges to restore the colour to the islands. Cailey’s memories of her mum, Chesley, life on the islands, herding sheep, canoeing, and more, are all portrayed with care and detail. Farewell North is a beautiful game when the colours bloom. There are some fantastic scenes that abstract things too – as a dog, the swift-moving traffic of the city is just an un-crossable stream of red and yellow lights; Cailey’s friends are faceless strangers who can morph into giant, grabbing hands as you try to sneak past.

Cailey’s world is grey and colourless with grief. Image credit: Kyle Banks/Mooneye Studios

As well as this love and exploration, the game also looks at something really familiar to me personally, and that’s what the passage of time does to rural communities. I grew up in a village, in an old sweet shop. The house was weird and wonky and our family had turned rooms into other rooms, and previous families had turned a corner into a kitchen. It was cold, and anyone taller than 5 ft 4 was bound to band their head, but it was home. After my mum moved out (it was too big for a single person and it knew too much, in that way that homes do), it was gutted and turned into three tiny holiday lets – perfect for a seaside village but seeing the photos was like a gut punch. Urban folk will know this too, the phenomenon of a much loved local shop or establishment falling into disrepair or being bought out by glossy businesspeople with MBAs and no heart. Farewell North captures this time and time again. Your childhood home is dilapidated, with a hole in the wall and encroaching ivy. The old Campbell farm, locked off and owned by an energy company. Neglect and the passage of time, always moving forward and leaving so much behind. It’s not the game’s primary focus but it’s another layer of sadness adding texture to an already sad tapestry.

The soundtrack is something special too. Quiet and thoughtful at times, huge and emotive, and reaching an inescapable crescendo at others, it is the perfect accompaniment to the game. The voice acting too is authentic and full of emotion. I don’t know that I’d listen to it separate from the game, but I can’t imagine the game without it.

Cailey and Chesley visit mum’s grave. Image credit: Kyle Banks/Mooneye Studio

THIS IS THE PARAGRAPH WITH SPOILERS.

The reason for Cailey’s one-last trip to the islands is a horribly sad one. Dogs are faithful, wonderful companions and their lives are tragically much shorter than our own human ones. Some years after her mum dies and Cailey takes Chesley back to Edinburgh, Chesley follows mum off the mortal coil. Cailey is taking him back to all his favourite places, to eventually spread his ashes where his true home was. They visit mum’s grave, they climb mountains, they canoe together. She says that it feels like losing her mum all over again. Anyone who has been in this position, where a truly beloved pet is the last link to a person who meant so much, will understand this precarity. The joy of love and the pain of revisited endings. This game is an absolutely beautiful, poignant, devastating, heart-aching exploration of that experience. There is simply nothing else like it. No, you’re crying onto your keyboard.

OK NO MORE SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT.

Games can encourage us to reflect on our own worlds, but they can also tell us the stories of others, people who have lived differently from us. They can also bring us together with deeply felt, universal emotions – almost everyone will eventually feel the loss of a parent. That experience is beyond language. Of course, every individual experience is unique and people grieve and experience grief in different ways, but Farewell North takes a common experience and treats it with care as it presents it to the player; “it feels like your world is ending, and that’s okay. It’s not strange to feel like that, here are your emotions, your pain and sadness and crushing darkness represented in a video game. Your despair is valid and understood and seen.”

The game is beautiful. Image credit: Kyle Banks/Mooneye Studio

Farewell North was made by a tiny team, so the only real issues I faced can be forgiven easily. There were a few glitches and bugs here and there but nothing so frustrating that I was mad about it. My main criticism is even about something where I can see the logic behind how they did it – to get from island to island you have to canoe, and the controls are very fiddly. I even turned on the simplified mode and found the navigation quite annoying and it really slowed the pace of the game. Of course, the tricky rhythmic controls can be said to connect the player more directly to the experience of paddling a canoe, and they did give you a way to make it easier. The pacing too – I think it’s an easy argument to make that everyone should take a little bit of time and just connect to their bodies and movements and what they are doing, and to take slower moments of peace and serenity in between the more intense ones. I can see where the game was going. But the slowness and fiddlyness of the canoeing meant that there were a few optional islands I skipped, which was a shame because the ones I did go to were worth seeing.

All in all, Farewell North is a game about some pretty universal experiences that won’t appeal to everyone because not everyone wants their video games to induce multiple episodes of sobbing. However, anyone who is keen for a more emotional journey, particularly anyone who feels alone in their grief and wants to be seen and acknowledged by someone else, should absolutely give it a go. It is so terribly sad, but there are moments of joy to be found, and the sadness serves a purpose rather than just being tragic for the sake of it.

• Game: Farewell North

• Developer: Kyle Banks

• Publisher: Mooneye Studios

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox

• Time to complete: 5.5 hours

• Note - I received the key for this game for free to write this review

The ‘Ali Updates’ Section

Hey folks, thanks for your patience on this. I wanted to get it out much sooner but it has been tough. I started back at university in early September and I’ve been working as much as I can because we have a leaking roof and no money to fix it with. Unfortunately, because I don’t make any money from this project (well, shout out to my two paid subscribers) it can’t take priority over work that does pay. If you enjoy it and want me to keep doing it and would like to see me devote a bit more time to it, please consider subscribing for even a few bucks a month, it helps out so much. But for the time being, updates will be slower than I’d like them to be - I hope you can be patient.