Press A to give birth.

Endling is a game where you play as a mother fox and her four children as you explore and gather resources to keep your family healthy and safe in a world that is anything but. The interaction takes place entirely on a 2D plane but on a series of intersecting paths on the scale of a great wide world. Think Klonoa meets Shelter with an environmentalist angle. The premise alone perked my ears up, and not just because I have a sick fascination with why there are so many indie games specifically about foxes where most of what you do is walk around, perform context-sensitive actions, and be dazzled by its supposed emotional profoundness. Make no mistake, this is in many ways another one of those, but it's the first I've played that actually feels like a complete package that managed to command any amount of respect from me.

Endling's strongest element is the way it gets into the player's head. The game starts off in a (somewhat) natural space with low stakes and plentiful food to familiarize yourself with, but as each day passes, the landscape becomes more polluted, human-developed, and barren. Eventually, it becomes too dangerous to stay, and so your little fox family has no choice but to wander further and further out just to survive and scavenge amongst the concrete and trash for what dwindling scraps remain. There's an area where loggers are slowly whittling away at a forest day-by-day, and the impact is so gradual that by the time the landscape is completely bare I thought to myself: "Wait, when did it get like this?". Out of curiosity, towards the end of the game I revisited the area where I first started out and thought: "When did it get this bad?" I was constantly cursing the humans I came across whom I repeatedly wished would just leave me alone. And I loved this! It's incredibly effective gameplay that communicates exactly the message Endling is trying to get across.

What I find less compelling, however, are the non-interactive components. Pollution in the background occurs in the form of obnoxious jumpscares (or dumpscares) where waste will loudly rush into a river or garbage will tumble at your feet. The foxes visit a factory farm where you can see sick hens dangling from the ceiling and baby chicks being fed into a machine that shreds them into a fine pink paste. Failstates will always involve extended sequences of your fox mommy being gruesomely shot and sliced and ripped apart with a sickening dedication to animating just how horrible and agonizing each and every one of these deaths are. The Game Over screen also informs you that your children will definitely not survive and your whole family is dead and this is all your fault.

Does any of this go too far? These scenes are after all, background invisible realities of our present-day life whose consequences we will have increasingly less choice but to confront as humanity barrels forward to the point of no return with the inertia of a mammoth. Extinction is indeed Forever. I understand the shock value is intended to spur me into caring, but this storytelling wields all the subtlety of a hammer. It feels wrong to fault this game for simply depicting these things as they are, because they are cruelties that I should be moved by in some sense, but after seeing how deftly its messaging can be imparted in other departments, I can't help but think the rest of this was lacking in comparison. I can see this coming off as really schlocky to some, though not enough to me to completely ruin the experience.

But be warned, the ending of Endling is one of the most brazenly depressing sequences I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through. Nobody deserved this fate. This is all your fault.

For how much I enjoyed certain elements of this game I feel bad that I couldn't have enjoyed the overall package more, but it's still one of the better attempts I've seen so far at what it's trying to be, and for that I'm glad they attempted this and that it exists at all. Surely if we can examine a gamedev's decisions and learn from its mistakes we can learn from a whole lot more.

Endling does not make you name your babies but I chose to mentally name my fox cubs Griffin, Jerry, Shredder, and Lala. March forward, little dudes.