by It’s not the greatest title ever, but hey, it’s not the greatest game ever so I guess it fits.
If you like survival/crafting games, there are some amazing titles out there. True, you have to wade through the atrocious-to-subpar sometimes to weed them out, but games like Terraria, 7 Days to Die, and NEO Survivor really lead the charge. The Forest doesn’t quite live up to these titles, but it tries hard, and the things that it does well, it does *really* well. It’s not an awful game, but its composition doesn’t quite connect together the way it needs to. Needless to say:
–SPOILER ALERT–
In The Forest, you play as a silent protagonist who has crash-landed on strange island (technically peninsula). Immediately after the crash, your son is kidnapped, and with nothing other than the gear you find in the wreckage of the plane, you set out to rescue him. Early bits of the game will have you scooping up rocks and sticks to prepare the humblest of hovels. As you gain confidence and familiarity with your surroundings, you’ll set out to spelunk any of the many caves hidden about where you can discover new gear and underground horrors.
In little time, you’ll soon discover that you’re not alone–savage cannibals roam the island. At first, they appear to be human, but the longer you play you’ll no doubt realize there is something very wrong with your hungry neighbors. Upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that they are unhealthy, deformed and not-quite-human. Play longer and you’ll start to see the real horrors–spiders made of human legs, trumpeting mutants composed of human arms or massive deformed mounds of flesh that barrel at you at high speed. Coupled with the various subtle hints to some sort of scientific experiment on the peninsula gone wrong, you’ll begin to piece together that the origin of the creatures relates to something darker than just simple cannibals.
Eventually, you’ll break into a secret underground lab that was researching massive ancient artifacts with incomprehensible powers. Someone on the island (long dead from having several pencils jabbed into the orifices of his face) had used Artifact 2 to crash your plane and steal your son. He then activated Artifact 1 by sacrificing your son to bring his own daughter back to life. Eventually you run into the daughter, who sadly… is… well, she’s not normal. She has several things growing inside of her the burst out into a grotesque upside-down mutant horror that fights you as the game’s final boss.
At the end, you’ll get the choice the break the cycle by shutting down the artifacts once-and-for-all, or crashing a new plane flying overhead that just so happens to have 3 children on it, ripe for the picking… and so the cycle begins anew.
Now, all of this is awesome–in fact, from a story standpoint, it’s a pretty rockin’ sci-fi horror flick. The problem is… uh… you still have that pesky survival/crafting bit that takes up the other 90% of the game.
Sadly, very few games are able to manage the whole “survival” aspect of the survival genre very well. Either the survival bits are so oppressive that they make the game tedious, or they are so laughably easy that they just become a mindless chore necessary for playing the game. The Forest falls into the latter category, with the most complex “survival” mechanics being discernible and overcome with about 10 minutes of gameplay… leaving the rest of the adventure shackled to cramming food and water into your mouth like a child cramming tokens into a machine at an arcade to keep going. Animals are everywhere, birds bunch up and land in front of you practically asking to be slaughtered, TV Dinners respawn where they are found, soda is littered everywhere and the penalty for eating “poisonous” food is so laughably tame that I just ran around eating everything, spoiled, poisonous or not. Add to that, that if you really wanted to (I mean… there’s no penalty for it) you can chop up any of the cannibals and become a cannibal yourself if you’re really desperate.
Next is the whole “crafting” system. Crafting is a bit of a generous term–it’s more like, smoosh certain things together and get a slightly altered version of that thing. Some of it makes sense–like wrapping cloth around a stick and lighting it on fire with your lighter. Others make less sense, like stapling 30 cannibal teeth to my machete to make it deal more damage. The problem with the crafting is that nothing really amazing could be made from it–it was never really fun or exciting. Once in a while, you’d discover a combination that made something sort of interesting, but overall, most of the best gear is just found, not crafted. Likewise, all of the structures in the game are built with sticks, leaves, rocks, logs and very occasionally, rope. All of these are accessible to you from the beginning of the game, and since they are all built from extremely basic material, there’s never any progression in the game. You just have what you have, and its your job to use it as best as you can. Now, this is not inherently bad–in fact, NEO Survivor did the same thing, where your character never levels up and no new skills are gained (mostly) but where it becomes a problem in The Forest, is when you realize that there’s just not a whole lot to actually *do* in the game, and figuring out *how* to do those things is a pain.
When you’re just learning the ropes early on, this isn’t a problem. Simply learning the game is enough of a challenge that there doesn’t need to be progression. After you master the joke-of-a-survival system and grow confident to slay even hordes of cannibals, there’s not really anything left to work for–except that if played without a guide, the game expects you to spend hours combing over each and every inch of the island and its numerous cave systems to find all the pieces needed to make sense of the story and access the end-game. This isn’t really fun at all because again, the player isn’t really working towards anything. In Terraria, the promise of better and more interesting gear made exploration always exciting. In NEO Scavenger, the game hinged hard upon the survival mechanics up front–so simply surviving successfully *was* the game and provided a constant challenge. In The Forest…? You’re expected to slowly crawl across a massive peninsula looking for easily missed cave openings and little trinkets dropped on cave floors that you missed due to the (admittedly gorgeous) scenery.
Being an adult, I don’t have hours-on-end to waste on zero-growth potential, so I simply used a GPS-like map that someone made to locate the pieces of what I needed before moving on. I’m glad I did too, as I could easily have foreseen myself blowing another 30 hours hunting around for them, all the while not really having any fun as I ground my way through the same routine over and over again. If the game wanted to be about hunting around in caves for lost secret gear and conspiracy tapes, the in-game map should have been much more clear (I don’t say this often, but I think a mini-map would have been justified) and all unique items should have had a very obvious, “Hey! Hear I am! Pick me up!” kind of glow. Yes, both of these would have broken the game’s immersion, but lest we forget, this is still a game and games need hints, clues, rules and clear expectations to be playable. As it stands now, without the use of a 3rd-party map, we’re expected to play “hunt for the needle in the haystack,” a game that no one wants to play.
In spite of these flaws, the good parts of the game still make it worth playing. The aforementioned visuals and story are worth experiencing at least once and the cannibal AI is some of the best humanoid AI I’ve ever seen. Save for the occasional, “Haha, I’m on a weird rock and you can’t reach me” moments, I never felt like the cannibals were an AI–they simply felt like cannibals. For starters, their pathing was amazing. I never saw a cannibal get stuck on a rock, or stuck on each other, or move in any manner other than I could call fluid. It wasn’t just the pathing though. It was the meticulous time spend making them move, flow and act like cannibals. A group of cannibals at night might feel like they have the upper hand, and will attack as a pack but kill off a couple (especially the leader) and they lose confidence. A lone traveling cannibal may actually exhibit traits of childlike curiosity towards you, watching you work. Chase after a cannibal, and instead of fighting directly, they’ll run away and climb a tree until your back is turned. I’ve never quite seen AI like this, and its definitely one of the game’s selling points.
The game balances out to get a Tier 2 rating. I probably won’t ever play it again, but if any of the bits above interest you, The Forest is probably worth trying. There are definitely better survival/crafting games out there, but the pieces of this game that shine are hard to find elsewhere.
