There are also trash bags, with food inside, and fruit bushes. Some of the prey requires sneaking or hiding in a bush, but it’s never a challenge. Birds, fish, rabbits, mice, and chickens can be grabbed and dropped for the cubs to eat. The food choices are varied but function the same. They follow closely, although if you run too far ahead they might get lost and you’ll have to backtrack. Keeping the cubs alive is just about keeping them fed. Some routes can be opened to create shortcuts, by approaching from the rear, but most blockages are there until the game says it’s time to explore somewhere new, where there might be another lair to utilize. Many of the world’s areas are also arbitrarily restricted with blocked paths. Unfortunately, navigation and exploration is extremely boring because it is so rigid and repetitive. The camera adjusts and glides around as the paths change, so most of the time it is presented like a 2D platformer. These paths intersect and the mother fox can then switch to the connecting track, changing the navigation route like switching train tracks.

While the world in Endling is fully 3D, the fox (and trailing cubs) can only travel along linear paths that weave through the world. The trail always goes cold after three ghostly vestiges, and so the game progresses with the mother fox trying to keep her cubs alive, occasionally getting a reminder of what is missing. Each time there will be ghostly snapshots of the scavenger and the cub, many of which are just action poses that don’t tell much story. As the game continues across several weeks, the cub’s scent will return every once in a while, in forests, across creeks, around factories and shacks, and through industrial zones. You give chase, following the scent, but the track goes cold. Not long after the beginning, one cub is stolen by a heavyset scavenger man with an enormous rifle. As a mother fox, you have to keep the cubs fed during the night and return to the lair before dawn. After finding refuge within a burrow, which becomes your first lair, you give birth to four cubs. At the start, you are a fox on the run through a forest fire. The story in Endling is minimal and told via the world.

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