Faraway, Steph Thirion's Decade-Long Solo Project, Launches Today on Five Platforms

Steph Thirion spent more than a decade chasing a single idea: a game where every run is a new sky. On November 5, Annapurna Interactive finally ships the result. Faraway, a procedurally generated arcade game about a shooting star that connects points of light to survive, launches today on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

A decade-long solo project

Thirion is best known for Eliss, the 2009 iPhone game widely credited as one of the first to build its entire design around multitouch controls. He began work on Faraway not long after, and the game stayed a solo project through its entire development. Annapurna Interactive and Thirion first revealed it in December 2024 during Day of the Devs: The Game Awards Edition, describing it then as a minimalist, PC-only audiovisual experience about a shooting star weaving constellations to stay alive.

That framing has not changed on launch day. What has changed is how many people will get to play it. Eliss itself never had a true sequel; Thirion moved between smaller experiments and collaborations in the years after its release, and Faraway is the first project under his own name to reach this scale of publishing support. Annapurna's involvement also means Faraway arrives with the kind of marketing and platform relationships a one-person studio could not secure alone, including simultaneous storefront listings rather than a staggered rollout.

From a PC-only reveal to five platforms

On October 19, Annapurna confirmed that Faraway would expand well beyond its original PC-only pitch, adding PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and both current Nintendo consoles to the release plan. The console versions had not been part of the 2024 announcement, and the addition turned what was shaping up as a quiet Steam release into a same-day launch across every major platform. On PC, Faraway is available through both Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The gap between those two announcements, roughly 22 months, is typical of how Annapurna tends to handle smaller, author-driven projects: a reveal well ahead of release, followed by a long quiet stretch of development before a concrete date and platform list finally lock in. For a game built by one person rather than a studio with a marketing department to manage expectations, that slower drip of information is as much a function of the team's size as it is a publishing strategy.

How Faraway plays

Every run drops the player into a universe generated in real time, cast as a shooting star with a finite, flickering life. Connecting nearby stars into constellations harvests their energy, which extends that life and builds the run's score. The rule-set is small by design: players shape constellations freely and can take on riskier, more deliberate connections for extra energy and points, but a single misjudged link ends the run.

• An endless core mode where difficulty and speed rise with the player's own skill, pushing them into increasingly distant and demanding regions of space.
• Sixteen handcrafted puzzle stages built around specific constellations, designed to force players to rethink techniques they picked up in the endless mode.
• Online leaderboards that track best runs, alongside full controller support across every platform.

Annapurna's own description leans into the game's dual nature as "both challenging and chill," built for players chasing a personal best as much as those happy to drift through a few short runs. The visuals are generated entirely in real time rather than pre-rendered, a detail Thirion has carried over from Eliss's emphasis on direct, responsive play: what appears on screen is a direct result of how well, or how recklessly, a given run is going.

Full controller support across every platform also points to a deliberate choice about who the game is for. Rather than building around touchscreens, the way Eliss did on iPhone, Faraway's control scheme is built to feel the same whether a player is holding a DualSense, an Xbox pad, a Joy-Con, or sitting at a keyboard and mouse, which matters more than usual for a release landing on five storefronts at once.

Annapurna's bet on a one-person game

Faraway is a small release by design, but it lands on a publisher built around exactly that kind of bet. Annapurna Interactive has spent years backing small teams and solo developers on projects it believes can stand next to the rest of its catalog, and a decade-long passion project from the creator of a well-regarded mobile cult classic fits squarely inside that strategy. For Thirion, it is a rare chance to see a one-person idea reach PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo audiences on the same day as its PC release, rather than trickling out platform by platform over the following year.

It also arrives into a release calendar where Annapurna has been willing to let niche, formally inventive games find their own audience rather than chasing the biggest possible opening week. A procedurally generated arcade game about constellations is a difficult pitch to summarize in a single trailer, and the publisher appears to be betting that word of mouth among players who remember Eliss, plus the novelty of a true day-one launch across five platforms, will do more for Faraway than a conventional marketing push could.

Where to play it

Faraway is live now on Annapurna Interactive's official game page, on Steam and the Epic Games Store for PC, and on console storefronts for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Nintendo owners can find it through the eShop for both the original Switch and the newer Switch 2. Annapurna has not published pricing details beyond the storefront listings themselves, so players checking the game out today should confirm cost on their platform of choice before buying.