Farewell North, by Kyle Banks, is about a dog helping to restore color to his owner’s world. It’s about the loss of family, of home when you lose that family, about memories, good ones and hard ones, about letting go and holding on at the same time, and about love and how love hurts when you have to say goodbye. Farewell North is a game about the Orkney Islands, at least as Cailey remembers them, and the culture she wants to honor even after she has left her home behind. A nice touch is that the game provides Gaelic subtitles for every line of dialogue and emotion in addition to whatever subtitle track you use. I recommend turning them on for the full experience.
While playing Farewell North, you take control of the Scottish Border Collie, Chesley, a sheepdog who had to become a homebound dog as he and his owner, Cailey, return to the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland where she grew up for one last adventure to say ‘Farewell’ as she doesn’t see herself coming back ever again. As Cailey does so, she finds herself halted by grief and sorrow and doubts about decisions in her past, which causes her world to be lacking in color. Things like walls of vines or shattered pathways appear and require Chesley’s intervention to solve, allowing Cailey to fully face her past, the good memories and the sad ones, and move forward on her pilgrimage across five major Scottish Islands and through her memories. To this end, Chesley is armed with a few small but important abilities. He can bark to ‘talk’ to Cailey or to bother other animals – the same button can also be used to dig, pick up and put down object at the right times, and is used to get on and off the canoe – the ability to leap around the highlands, the ability to walk, run and sprint, swim for short distances, and the ability to create a pulse that temporarily restores color to the world.
I wasn’t kidding when I said Farewell North Is about restoring color, though it’s in an allegorical/magical realist sense rather than a literal lack of color. It’s more that the lack of color represents the distance Cailey has from her emotions, and Chesley has the power to help her find them again and to view things from a healthier viewpoint, removing the emotional obstacles from her path. There are six main story islands, as well as several smaller skerries, all of which have a story, even if it’s as simple as the time Chesley caused a small cave-in or another time he and Cailey played fetch. The big islands also have additional stories beyond their major plot beats that reveal a little bit more about Cailey and her life with Chesley both before she left the islands and after.
Farewell North is an adventure puzzler; there’s no combat, but there are several segments where you need to corral farm animals or follow animal tracks to discover a particular wild creature. The game has a very nice escalation of introduction to the gameplay elements. The first segment, still technically on the Scottish mainland in Caithness, teaches you your basic abilties, that you can restore color to plants and animals and that these can be used to progress forward and that you travel by canoe to the various islands. It also teaches you small things like how you can only jump so far down before the game will reset you to where you fell from, and that while you have to figure out a specific path to move forward, there’s no particular punishment for not figuring it out immediately. The first major island expounds upon these lessons, showing the the lack of color is explicitly tied to Cailey, that she becomes trapped by her own thoughts, and that you can help, often by finding the right series of tricks to find a plant or animal to alter the environment in some way, leading to a restoration of color and emotional clarity to Cailey, helping her to continue.
The second island introduces the shepherding mechanic, as well as revealing that Cailey – a grown woman – has known Chesley since she was a small child when her mother got him to be trained as a sheep dog for use on all the local farms including her own. It also reveals that wild animals can also provide color to the world and that interacting with them can change the environment to aid Chesley and Cailey. The third island changes things up, and is the only island to focus on Chesley and Cailey’s life once she’d moved away from the islands, and is the game’s only stealth section, representing a time where Chesley, not used to a confined city life, ran off and got lost. The patrolling figures represent people that Chesley was afraid of but ironically just wanted to help him return home. You also learn that Cailey took Chesley in after the death of her mother, and that Cailey’s journey continues even beyond visiting her mother’s grave. The fourth island plays even further with the concepts of travelling through Chesley and Cailey’s memories, as you must change the geography by going through portals in and out of periods of memory, to go back in time before a fence was erected to find a path forward, for example. This island also has one of the few non boat segments where you play as Cailey, with no sign of Chesley as she tries to track down an injured fox to make sure she doesn’t need medical intervention. The final island brings all of the mechanical and thematic elements together, with Chesley helping Cailey drag her canoe through a frozen landscape by using the power of memories and emotions to bring the color of summer back and melt the snow and ice in the way, it’s safe to say that it was masterfully done and it got to me despite suspecting what was coming since the first island.
There is a lot of exploration, navigation, and side content. While the Orkney Islands of Farewell North are nowhere near as big as the actual islands and are also not the same with some shifting and moving around, and a couple of islands split apart for better narrative flow and more exploration potential, they are still big and the only way to get between them is by Cailey’s canoe. While the rowing mechanic implement is fascinating and fairly accurate to how rowing actually works – pushing against the water in a rythm, pushing harder on one side to turn the other way, backpaddling to turn faster, etc. – I pretty quickly turned on the simplified rowing and did not look back. While rowing, you can open your compass and see markers for the directions of the next plot island to visit, and the locations of any skerries that you know how to tackle. Skerries are the smaller islands in the Ornkeys, and here each one is a small side story, be that of a time Chesley and Cailey played fetch before getting caught in the rain, helping out by corralling up chickens, or splitting out a family of cows from a herd of sheep and moving them into seperate pens, or even helping free a whale trapped in a net. One even has a secret minigame hidden on it. Each island, big and small, also has a whole host of side material to find. Will-O-Wisps help improve Chesley’s stamina so you can run longer, while all the rest of the content you can find such as benches with majestic views, lamps for Chesley to dig up and return to lighthouse ruins to restore them to working order, verses of Cailey’s mother’s favorite song tucked away along the coast, more stories of Cailey’s youth and even the meaning of and original spelling of her name, all of those are just for atmosphere and achievements.
Finding every last one of them was a delight, even if I was kicking myself for having missed several the first time around. If you are having trouble finding the collectibles, most of them are tracked in Cailey’s journal, and you can check to see how many are left to find and how many are on whatever island you happen to be on. What you cannot do is check how many are on a given island if you’re not on it. There’s no map to check your progress on an island. Or a map, for that matter. Yes, the game does provide beacons for missed collectibles and moments once you’ve finished the game, but a simple map to navigate the islands while on the canoe would have been very helpful. That was basically my only complaint.
To sum up, if you like narrative-heavy, emotionally hitting adventure games with puzzles and minimal to no combat, Farewell North is for you. Hell, if you like dogs, this is the game for you. And yes, you can pet the dog. Or get pet as the dog, rather. There’s an achievement for it and everything.
Tim played Farewell North on PC with a review code.
