Endling – Extinction is Forever review: The cute red fox breaks your banged-up heart

First up, a warning: If you’re someone who has a hard time watching animal movies, you’re going to struggle with new indie survival adventure Endling – Extinction is Forever. In presenting a dystopian future where Mankind’s activities have spurred on ecological collapse, Spanish development house Herobeat Studios has clearly committed to depicting harsh truths. That means that animal distress and death are shown, and never softened. The result is an instant contender for the title of Most Emotionally Moving Game of 2022.

An endling is the last individual survivor of a species or subspecies, and in Endling – Extinction is Forever, you play as exactly that: the last adult fox in existence. Except, you’ve just given birth to a litter of cubs, and it’s up to you to protect and raise these defenceless but adorable furballs.

Survival games are typically sombre experiences as is, but 3D sidescroller Endling sets the stakes even higher. If you die, falling victim to the many threats in the polluted and ravaged world around you, your babies won’t survive. Game over for them, and foxes in general. And while players generally don’t have to worry about the cubs succumbing to human hunters and their traps, they can still die from starvation and, evidently, exhaustion. You really don’t want their deaths on your conscience.

Endling makes a powerful point about humanity’s destruction of life on Earth, including of our own species. It’s a genuinely unforgettable, if harrowing, experience – harnessing stirring music, stylised but striking design, and a wordless story to tell its important tale about the direction we’re driving the planet and its inhabitants.

All this said, Endling is an example of how powerful and meaningful gaming experiences do not necessarily equate with deep, fulfilling gameplay. There are really just two aspects to play in Endling. The first is straight-up survival, looking for food for your cubs, and teaching them skills through chance incidents and encounters that will develop their self-sufficiency. The second component is a story arc involving your missing fourth cub, taken by a hulking human known as the Scavenger.

You don’t have much control over the second bit. Some nights in the game’s approximately 30-day cycle you wake to find a scent trail that leads you closer to your cub. The trails also trigger memories that flesh out the Scavenger’s own upsetting story. It’s not just animals who have been turned into desperate refugees in this dark future.

There’s a well-constructed tension between looking for your missing little one and feeding your cubs, but the reality is that you’ll spend most of your time in Endling engaged in the latter. Every night you leave your den to traverse an open world map looking for food. As time passes, and your cubs grow, more trails unlock, allowing you to roam further. The risk here, though, is that you may still be outside your den after sunrise, when the threat of human encounters increases.

For the record, Endling – Extinction is Forever sticks to its survival guns. Heroic battles rarely pan out for mamma fox. Sneaking past, and running from, threats is encouraged instead.

Still, there’s no real pressure, apart for searching for your missing cub, to take such risks. Ultimately, it falls to the player to mix up their experience in order to make it more interesting. While you’re never forced, you should investigate markers on the map, and unexplored paths. Just beware the game’s greatest headache, the brutal Furrier, who has a knack for ambushing you as you’re wrapping up a long evening. When that happens, you’ll have to replay the whole day.

In its defence, Endling isn’t a long game. A single playthrough takes around four hours, which prevents things from becoming samey, for the most part. Boredom is touch and go at times though.

Also worth noting is that Endling isn’t a cynical game. Kindness and compassion still shine through. However, the game is unquestionably bleak. Our world feels like a very dark and hopeless place right now, and if you’re in that headspace, you’ll find a similarly depressing outlook in Endling.

Hats off to Herobeat Studios for refusing to pull their punches in creating their stark environmental awareness tale. Personally, though, I wish the game had a slightly more hopeful, slightly less ambiguous ending, given how easy it is to become invested in the survival of its cute family unit, so lovingly and authentically animated. There’s a good cathartic cry, with a bittersweet spark, and then there’s sobbing triggered by heartbreak. Endling – Extinction is Forever makes its very important point, and ultimately can be interpreted as poignant, but I wish it didn’t have to hurt quite so much. Two days later and I still haven’t recovered emotionally from it.

Endling – Extinction is Forever is out today, 19 July for PC (through Steam, Epic and GOG stores), Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One.