The Forest Game
The Forest is one of the first Early Access games . It was single player only, so no nightmare net coding. It was focused on survival and had an actual story. And, to top it all off, the threat wasn’t going to be zombies. It wasn’t clear what exactly the danger was. Because, while I liked “Minecraft” survival, you didn’t have the constant danger experience, outside of multiplayer. Sure, someone can stalk you around and plot a breaking and entering, but it’s not the same. In single player, a simple wall or door kept you safe at night. So “The Forest” was what I was looking for. I bought it for $15, and now, all these years later, it’s out of Early Access and done. The story is finished, and they even added multiplayer. So let’s see how it went.
About Game
Wat?! The game has a simple, but intriguing premise. You’re a dad, and on a flight with your son Timmy and his unfortunate haircut. You learn why Spirit Airlines gets the rates it does, as the plane crashes into the earth unexpectedly. You survive the crash, but your son is taken by a mysterious red figure. From here, it’s up to you to survive the mysterious forest you’ve crashed into and find your son. But it soon becomes clear you’re a trespasser. There are strange creatures watching you, and some definitely don’t appear to be human. And that’s it. How are you so good at survival? How come you’re not immediately being rescued? Why did the plane crash at all, and what IS living in the woods? Well, a lot gets answered, but I’ll save that for the end. Let’s focus on graphics for now. For a small indie developer aiming as high as realism, it’s damn good. It’s also impressive how many art assets are from the Early Access 2014 version. Textures were upgraded, the engine was updated, but “The Forest” has always been a very pretty game. The lighting effects are nice, and improved a lot over time, but I think something changed for the worst with the shader for sunlight. It seems more washed out and overblown than I remember. It looks fine when you’re actually under the trees (which is where you’ll spend most of your time anyway), but outside of that I find it weirdly hazy. It’s not terrible or anything, but there might be some original “Forest” players who also remember a gloomier time. It’s not a big deal – you can easily tweak down settings like Bloom. Isn’t it nice when there’s just easy options for all this stuff? I’m not bitter at all. You can play with color grading if you want the game to be set in Hollywood Mexico, or Hollywood… everywhere else in a scary movie, really. There’s a lot to tweak. The giant cave systems are also filled with detail and absolutely horrifying. “The Forest” is one of those games that does darkness correctly. Darkness is DARK. Night isn’t just some blue filter, it is BLACK. They did a great job creating a realistic woodland environment. The map itself is handcrafted, so you never see anything too wonky, and a lot of your items are based on real world counterparts and brands, like the BIC or CIL lighter. Having all that stuff grounded in normalcy is great for immersion, but it also helps make the unusual that much more uncomfortable.
Game Play
It’s kind of shocking for a game like this, but it’s a kickass soundtrack. There’s also a great non-diegetic soundtrack, but it mainly plays at story moments, so I can’t do those here. There’s some great guitar and synth work.. You appreciate the music a lot when it comes in, since the game is usually devoid of it, but it’s a perfectly appropriate grindhouse score. So it has some strong presentation, especially for such a tiny team. So, good going so far. Now let’s talk about the gameplay. You’ve got 4 difficulties to choose between. These can make your enemies or your survival meter harder, but you could also turn the enemies off. There is a creative mode, but you need to beat the story to unlock it. It’s a little strange. Your plane will crash in one of a few preordained locations. Like I said before, there’s only one map, so no procedural generation jank here. So you start gathering stuff up to survive. Which at first means rifling through suitcases for snack bars and drinks, but things get more complicated. You could eat berries, but some are poison, so you need to learn to eat the RIGHT berries. You could drink standing water, but that’s basically poison too – it’s untreated. So you’ll need to make a rain collector, or boil it properly – you get what I mean. There are several ways to get meat. You could go the old-fashioned route and just hunt it down. But meat has the problem of spoiling. And meat will go bad here in only a few in-game hours. So you could go for the trapping approach and then save your food for later, or hang your meat to dry in the wind, though this will take a lot longer. You can also forego meat entirely, so you have a lot of options to keep the meters filled. Even on Hard Survival, the “survival” part is pretty easy. You may begin to wonder why birds constantly land around you, just completely still, or why deer will just give up on life and accept death right in front of you. That, or self-immolating themselves in the campfire for political reasons. The animal AI has constant breakdowns. Small prey animals, like rabbits and squirrels react realistically and get the hell out when they see you coming, but so many animals will just come right to you, that it gets really silly. As you’d expect, going vegan will add some challenge into your life. Otherwise, it’s painfully easy to get tendies with very little effort. Then again, sodas are one of the best rehydrators in the game, restores your energy, and booze cures cold. If you’re ever at risk of hypothermia, and have booze, DON’T DO THAT. So, if you turn on peaceful mode, wanting to roleplay “Hatchet” or “My Side of the Mountain”, you might find that lacking. But, to be fair, having to eat airplane meals is just one struggle of the game. You still need to be collecting resources and building up, because you need to build real estate and club turtles. If you can’t make food and drink at home yet, that means going out and possibly dealing with the neighbors. It’s a lot more likely they’ll find you than you find them. You might make enough noise to attract them, or wander onto their hunting grounds. You can hide from them for a few days, but eventually, they find you. It was a tribe of dirty cannibals the whole time. The first ones you encounter will likely be emaciated and deranged – something foul you might only see on National Geographic or a local Con. One or two can be taken out easy. Combat is wild and pretty fucking brutal. Your character is not a trained fighter, so he just swings wildly. You might have also noticed the cannibals aren’t just beelining to kill me. In fact, after I finish off the first one, the other one runs off into the woods. I never see her again that day. But then comes the night…
Problems of Game
Not only did she come back, she brought more with her. They start surrounding the campsite, calling out to each other. This is the true horror of your enemy. These aren’t mindless zombies – this is a sentient enemy, and it acts like it. If you encounter one alone, they might just run away. The dirty feral ones are more likely to be hostile right from the get go, but they’ll still be more curious than out to eat you. They might just watch what you’re doing, and then try to creepily get into your blind spot. Their AI has tendencies, but it’s not completely reliable, like a lot of other games. Hiding a body of a feral away from where you were might be a good idea. They’re not above eating their own dead, but does it help? I don’t know. All I know is having corpses around distracts my work. They’re unsettling, but only the start of your problems. Besides just trying to murder you, they’ll rob your food too. In an all-out attack, they even might try to break some buildings. However, these are just the banished outcasts. Encountering a proper tribe is when shit really hits the fan. Because they’re smarter. See, if you do kill some ferals, it’s not a huge deal. If anything, having a big enough war crime in your yard keeps them from stopping by. With a tribal, killing them means they’ll send someone looking. Let them run off, and they’ll definitely be visiting, but they might not be too hostile. If you haven’t been trying to kill them non-stop, you’ll have a strange, uneasy relationship. You’re both wary of each other. They might just hang out at night, watching you from the bushes and the trees. You go to confront a patrol of them, and they just run away into the hills. They can start making strange effigies in and around your campsite. You never know what to expect. Are they attacking or just measuring? Jesus Christ! Where’d… the other one go? Did I mention this game has VR support? You can enjoy that if you want to… The unpredictability is great for the horror aspect. The act of trying to understand all the cannibals helps you succeed. What locations are important to them? Does building around or going near them piss them off? What actions can I take that will make them afraid of me? How about chopping up a tribal body and then waving the body parts at another one? Well, that got him far away instantly, but… is he gonna tell his friends about it? They are a community. I mean, sure, making a giant effigy out of all these parts and lighting it on fire scares them off tonight, but they’ll be back with greater numbers. You need to try and figure out the tribes, how they behave and where they reside. Ideally, you generate enough fear to keep them away from you and let you work in peace. If you go overboard (like, really overboard), well, the natives become restless. Their attacks increase in size and sophistication, and they’ll start unleashing more of their horrors from the caves below. What starts as survival, can escalate into full-out jungle warfare. The traps get deadlier and the stakes get higher. And it stays fun and scary and intriguing, because the enemy feels worthy of it. Their animations are fast and fluid, and they do feel intelligent, but not predictable. I won’t spoil all the things you can see them do, but there’s a lot. Now, I did wonder (and I’m sure others do too): is it possible to make peace with them? Well, if I was an underdeveloped culture, and saw a man fall out of the sky and start blowing people up with bombs, I think I’d have no choice but to worship him as a god too.
Character screaming
Hey, they started it! So, the cannibal stuff is neat, and we do need more games where you can take an arm and slap people with it. But there are some systems surrounding all that. As I mentioned before, there’s the combat. It’s simple, but satisfying. You can move and hit for light attacks, but for power attacks you have to remain still. With you being so slow, compared to the natives, the power attack is risky, but worth it if you manage to pull it off. Add Tony Hawk air time to the mix, and they explode into chunks. It’s tough to do, but never gets old. The big cheese tactic is stun-locking them with a fast weapon, but there’s rarely just one. The nastier basement-dwelling enemies are immune to this anyway. But melee is only one option. There are all kinds of deadly man-made weapons to find around the peninsula, but it’s also backed up by some robust crafting mechanics. There’s a lot to experiment with. You can make a weapon completely from scratch, or upgrade some existing ones. Why stop at a machete, when you can cover it in teeth? Modifications like that are permanent, but there are also temporary upgrades. Arrows and weapons can be lit on fire. The poison berries from earlier aren’t useless – you can coat them on your weapons. There are lots of useful new things to discover, but also clowny shit too. A big rock is good for finishing off an enemy, but you can also make an upgraded rock. Then you can set it on fire. Just to hurt yourself. [character screaming]
Game Look
It’s a good way to make more satisfying discoveries. If you wanna fight less, there’s also a stealth system. It’s your standard crab-walk sneak. You can increase it by covering yourself in mud, or making special stealth armor. And getting it high enough means you might be able to bail out of some dangerous situations. Once again, simple, but adds some depth. Speaking of that: you do have some background stats. These can affect your melee damage, your movements speed and overall stamina. So eating big to get big then exercising is viable. These are all great additions. A lot of games just have hunger, thirst and a building system, and then they’re done. But there’s even more. Understandably, the horrors of the forest are a lot to take in, so you have to deal with sanity. The more depraved actions you take (like murder, or participating in cannibalism yourself), the lower it goes. You restore it by listening to tapes, relaxing, and generally being a good human being again. The bushes in the game already look like human silhouettes. Then your sanity gets lower. You start seeing movement where there is none, hear audio hallucinations, the forest starts playing tricks on-
Unlocks
Wait… It unlocks effigies, but then you want it to be low. Or you can be infected, but there is no way of telling, because it’s just a background stat thing, and you’d have to look in the book. Wait a minute… Here I couldn’t wash off the blood that causes infection. I had to re-load a save to fix it. I can’t pick up this clue in a cave, and it’s not just me. Enemies sometimes pop through gates, or hit things behind walls. The more footage I look at, the more bugs I see. It’s almost like… playing an Early Acess game. But they’re done. They’re working on a sequel. I’ve gotten stuck in the environment a few times. The log sled sent me flying into the stratosphere. When you have features that go nowhere, combined with a ton of bugs, it looks to me that the game is blatantly unfinished. Every game can have some bugs, so I usually don’t mention them, if they’re minor. But this time around, “The Forest” has won me over by the sheer volume of them. Even when tiny, something goes wrong incredibly often. While they were clearly done with the content, and just left it as is, there is a severe lack of polish. I’m genuinely surprised that this is the amount of bugs they were okay with. This kind of jank also extend into how features are organized. Let’s look at the building system. You’ve got a book that has tabs. Simple enough. Let’s say that you wanna build a wall. This page has a custom wall, you go a few more – basic wall. Then you keep going a bunch more… Defensive wall. Strange, but okay. How about building a door? It’s right there, right? Yeah, but, did you know you can make a door with a lock? You don’t press something putting a door down – you put down a custom wall, and then cycle through it, until you get a door with a lock. That’s not well explained. Okay, how about this one… You know a rabbit trap? If you place it in water, it just turns into a fish trap. Would you ever figure that out, without it being an accident? You can craft a repair tool. You just bang on your stuff, and it fixes it up for free. Except, one time I thought it bugged out and stopped working. It turns out, sometimes, it needs logs to repair certain buildings. Which specific buildings and why? I have no clue. It’s as if construction had an entire final pass it needed, that just never happened. So much is disorganized and needlessly cryptic. You could say “Research the wiki”, but this isn’t “Minecraft”, or some multiplayer-focused survival game. “The Forest” has a story. There’s mystery at the center of it. A wiki is the absolute last place you should be sending me. Speaking of story, there is an issue with how it progresses. The game encourages you to explore down to the bottom of a massive sinkhole. The intended way is cave-exploring through the massive network of them. Getting to the bottom requires two items. First, a climbing axe, because “The Descent” is a cool movie. "Ahh!" Then a rebreather, for all your terrifying underwater cave exploring needs. Here’s the thing: there are only one of each of these items, each in their own cave. When you get to the bottom, you need a third item. It’s not used for movement, like these two items (in fact, it’s not even connected to them). So you can go through hell, get to the very bottom and realize you needed a third item, and then have to go all the way back up, or load a save. I was a completionist, and explored every single cave before going all the way down. Not everybody is going to do that. The experience of the trek through the earth can be completely destroyed by someone getting there and realizing they’re gated off. They either go all the way back up, or go on the wiki and figure out how to spawn the item they need. I kinda wish I looked at the wiki. I tried to make a fire on the cliff, and it vanished, but I still needed the materials. I thought I was misinterpreting something, like how “Smash” players practice the wrong kind of grooming. Then I saw the fire had spawned somewhere up on a rock, way above me. There’s no “cancel blueprint from afar” button, and I didn’t know about console commands. So I had to live with the notification in the corner, or go down and try to kill it over and over again. And I got it eventually, but, man, what a trial over a minor thing. I need to stop thinking of “Smash Brothers”. I do commend them for having a story in the game – a lot of others in the genre just don’t bother – yet a few more spawns of the key story item could have helped. The overall lack of polish is my biggest issue with “The Forest”, because, sure, it would have been nice to have more scary mutant variety (and no, I don’t count recolors), but progressing through the story and finding special items are deeply tied into spelunking. Yet my torch puts out less light than my CIL lighter. There’s not much more to say on the issue. It sucks, because I do like the game a lot. At the same time, whenever I recommend it to a friend, I always have to say “Yeah, it’s basically an Early Access game still”. They’re working on a sequel, it will likely stay like this forever. I mean, there is an entire mountain biome, but barely a reason to go there. This could have been one of my favorite single player survival games. I do like it a lot, but all the issues really bring it down. It’s immensely frustrating, but at least you have cannibals to take that out on. I usually go for the katana. I just wanna go outside again, but… you won’t let me. I don’t wanna be angry anymore. I just want this to be over.
Berserk OST - Gats
Eh, they’re all back the next day. So how about the multiplayer? SPICY: “I had to spray you with “CringeBeGone”.” “The Forest” servers are a coin flip, so you mainly wanna play with friends. Instead of playing one dad, you are now the Dad Collective. So now it’s up to you and your alternative family to try and find Timmy. SPICY: “No, Dimitri is bald and Chinese as well!” MANDALORE: “We’re clones?” It’s almost like playing another game. In multiplayer, you can build a super fortress, that would take a long time to do alone. Of course, the rapid expansion does come at a cost. Your mass deforestation and general meddling gets the natives really angry, so things quickly turn into a war, right from the get go. You can still raid caches and do everything else you could in singleplayer, right down to completing the story. If you have played it before, you’re only in the caves for the items. [buzzing of chainsaw]