“What was that? Did you make that noise?”
“You mean the maniacal laughter?”
“Yes.”
“In that case – no, I did not… There they are!”
“How many?”
“There was one but can’t see now.”
“Here they come…”
“Oh my God, what is that thing?”
“Run run run run run ruuuuuun!!!”
“Out of stamina, don’t leave me!”
“There’s the river, but where is the raft? Where is the god-damned raft!!!?”
The Forest is an atmospheric first-person survival horror crafting game. It starts with you crashing in an airplane, and… you know what, that’s it, I can’t restrain myself any more, I know that if you read this, we are not yet on the same page, you might even be slightly bored, so I have to spoil the review: this game is absolutely totally utterly perfectly entirely unreservedly definitely unconditionally amazing. I don’t remember ever being so pleasantly surprised by a game, definitely absolute gaming experience of the year for me, like it was tailor-made for us.
Now that the air is filled with the appropriate level of excitement, let me get back to the story. The game starts with you surviving a plane crash, and as you slowly open your eyes, you see a creepy red man taking a child into his arms and walking out of the wreck, with presumably sinister intentions. After you fully regain consciousness, you leave the wreck and your adventure begins.
Your first task is going to be to loot anything that’s not nailed down in the immediate vicinity of the plane crash, and then promptly leave said vicinity, because it gained too much attention from the natives. If you are lucky, you will find a secluded place, settle down, and slowly but surely increase your standard of living from log-tent to well-protected fortress mansion. Technically, the goal of the game is to find your kid. But if you are anything like us, you will spend 40 days bolstering your defenses and improving your weapons before you even consider going near a cave. So the game kinda breaks down into these two parts – the faffing on the island, and then advancing the story.
Faffing has never been more satisfying. The game is actually mostly crafting, you get an axe, fell a tree, collect the log and the sticks, build a spear, build a log-wall or a small house, you get the idea. You also need to eat and drink regularly (more on why this is surprisingly not annoying later), dress up warm if it’s raining or you venture into the snowy bits, build a fire to cook, create a garden, etc. However, while you do all this building, you also have to avoid drawing too much unwanted attention to yourself. You really don’t want the natives to find you, and only want to fight them on your own terms. Once they find your base, they attack again and again and again, in ever-increasing numbers, so combat is simply not a viable long-term strategy. You have to rely on hiding and preparation. If they find you at your base, they will keep attacking, but if you manage to sneak out, and hunker down in a secondary base for a few days, they will eventually stop. So the game is all about conquering and taming this wilderness by building bases in strategic positions and keeping ample supplies. The map is too large to cover the distances in a day, and you really don’t want to stay outdoors overnight.
But the game is also about exploring horrific locations. See, once you have done enough faffing, and familiarised yourself with the layout, it’s time to do some story bits. You really don’t have much to go on, just the fact that a man in red paint kidnapped your son, and that there are very weird creatures roaming on the island. So you do the only logical thing: you poke your head into the deep, dark, mazelike cave system under the island. I won’t spoil anything, you basically put together the story based on bits of notes and pictures and clues you find scattered around. There is some linearity to exploring the caves, you might need a device to breathe underwater or a climbing axe to advance through some bits. Everything is carefully designed, no procedurally generated anything, and the story and exploration actually leads to a story climax.
The Good
There are so many good things about this game that I have to break them into sub-chapters.
Good 1 – Atmosphere
Never have I felt so wrong about overusing a word before, it feels like you keep referring to a lot of things as atmospheric, and then suddenly something like The Forest comes, which quite frankly oozes with atmosphere, and then you are left with no big words. So you throw in an “ooze”. The game is extremely highly intensely atmospheric, you really feel like you are there. I don’t know how it does it, but for no time did I refer to my avatar as “my guy”, it was always “me”.
The sense of danger, the cannibal creeps lurking in the shadows, is simply outstanding. It’s super realistic, they will never ever attack you in a single line, oh no, they sense you, and then they might just run away. But at that point the game is on, and unless you can hide, they will be back for you, slowly encircling you, like a horde of human hyenas.
There are all kinds of stories online, I heard about a guy taming one cannibal, teaching him to crouch. Which is amazing. There really is that sense of mystery around the game, due to its relative obscurity. You never feel like you figured out the rules. The constant escalation is obvious, there are more and more encounters, but it’s never clear why exactly. Did you make them angry, do they not like you venturing into the caves, or what happened?
I think the title perfectly encapsulates this mysterious atmosphere. The Forest. I mean, what kind of stupid title is that, I thought at first. We are on an island, surrounded by cannibals, there is an ocean, we are fighting for survival. But then I realised how central and important the concept of the forest is in this game. You can hide in the underbrush, but it’s also more difficult to spot the enemies, and really, 90% of the tension comes from staring at trees. Which is much funnier than how it sounds. Did you hear something, or was that the wind? Is something moving over there, and if yes, is it an animal or something else?
Oh, and the game has no music. And I am really a sucker for good game music, even mediocre games are elevated for me, for example, I am convinced there is a good game in Trine because its soundtrack is enchanting. But with The Forest, I really love the silence. It’s amazing how tense and immersive a situation can become if you only have natural sounds. Huge thumbs up.
Good 2 – Exploration
Ahh, that feeling of seeing those mysterious shapes in the distance, and after days of careful planning and preparation finally checking it out. Or crafting a large boat and finally sailing around. It’s impossible to describe, you really have to experience it yourself, highest high ever. The sense of exploration is really strong with this one. I wonder what is over that hill, oh, a village, I wonder what’s over there, oh, a cave, I wonder what’s inside. And if you are cautious people like we are, all of these steps can take multiple days.
The funny thing is that you can get a map and a compass, but we missed them. So we spent like 25 hours exploring blind. And it was great! You know what we did? We drew our own map (which turned out to be very wrong once we compared it with the actual map). And you just know a game is great when you start doing things like that, keeping handwritten notes, etc.
The game does not drown you with items, there are maybe a dozen of items you can find scattered around the island, but as a result, every single one is satisfying. Like finding the <very strong weapon I am not going to spoil>, or new clues, or animals.
And the sense of exploration never seems to fade. Sure, the final area is weird and things happen there, but even in the sandbox area of the game, our largest WTF moment came at like 30 hours. As in “WTF IS THAT THING!!!!?”.
I would say this game is beautiful, at least when there are no moving characters on screen. I mean, animals and enemies look good, but they are certainly not AAA-level models. The environment, however, is great. There are moon cycles in this game, for crying out loud, one night you can really clearly see the side of the lake, and then a couple days later it becomes dark. Sunrises on the beach, misty pines in a foggy afternoon, the frozen whiteness of the north… Good stuff, good stuff.
Good 3- Organic Storytelling
I really love games that work with a limited number of scripted events. Sure, a cinematic game like God of War can be great, and you feel awesome, nothing wrong with that. But there is something really admirable when the story highs come from a dynamically generated situation. For one, it is going to be completely unique to you, and that makes it special. Second, organically evolving situations makes the story very immersive, and you really feel like it’s your story and the consequences of your actions.
We started the game by building up a nice and stable base at a very secluded area. We were very lucky to find that place, had almost no hostility in the area, but we realised we will need to scatter smaller bases over the island. So we guerilla-built a treehouse at a location that seemed to be important. A few days later, we misjudged the time, couldn’t get home before dark, so we decided to spend the night at the treehouse. And that is when they found us. A group of strong mutant cannibals just happened to be patrolling the area, and they saw us climbing up. Trembling in the treehouse, listening to the noises, watching the moon rising over the lake, and all the time wondering if they can climb up, or if they can cut the tree under us – I don’t recall when was the last time I felt such intensity. And it all evolved organically, there was no “treehouse attack” level planned in the game, we generated it ourselves.
Or when we finally decided to sail across the island, and found the <thing that I am not going to spoil>.
Or when in our nicely planned and structured base, one lazy rainy afternoon, while we were just tending the rabbit cages or the garden, that THING appeared out of nowhere. And there is no jump scare, no sound effect. The game did not even call our attention to it. One of us just turned around and said something like “Wait, is that a… what is that thing?”, and we were forced to fight it. It felt incredibly perverse and invasive in our nice camp.
One more example of how immersive the game is: your main stats are Strength and Athleticism. But the way you increase them is quite realistic, your Strength increases if you swing your arm while also having plenty of calories to burn, and you gain Athleticism by sprinting a lot. Oh, and you can get fat too which impacts your other stats and Stamina.
The game has a number of boring activities that we should hate, but did not. Every single day, you have to eat multiple times, you need to drink, hunt, gather food, etc, and we did it gladly, and enjoyed the process thoroughly. I think that is because it was part of the story, and felt completely natural and justified.
That was the organic part of the story. But there is also traditional, pre-written story around it. And you know what? That is great too. Even the ending, yes there is an ending, and it’s a good one. You never would have expected a game like this. I was fully prepared for an Outward-level of nonsense, but no. There is even a choice, and it works.
All right, it is a bit weird how it turns out the kid that the creepy red thing steals is your child and you are supposed to save it but the actual best choice is to start a blueberry farm in a secluded area and hunt turtles for a couple of weeks, and the game never punishes you for that, but that’s about our only grief. Every other “scripted” area of the story works great, the haunting past theme is really strong, reminds me of the good old days of early Lost. You stumble upon clues that you just put in your little book with no context, like a magazine article from the ’80s or a drawing some missionaries did in the 19th century. They really took the Dark Souls route when it comes to story. Oh, and there is no spoken word in most of the game.
Good 4 – Crafting & Building
It’s satisfying as hell. We made the comment with Niffelheim about how crafting can never be a good co-op mechanism, because you are just taking opportunities from each other. Well, it turns out, it can, you just need a good game loop.
Building up your small encampment into a mighty and impenetrable fortress in the middle of enemy territory is an awesome and empowering feeling. We started slow, just with two shelters, some campfires, a rabbit trap. And slowly expanded by placing a garden, a large log cabin, lights, fences, rabbit cages, birdhouses, storage for all our stuff, defensive barriers.
Half of the stuff is decoration, and it really shows how great a game is when you pay attention to stuff like that. When you are just happy to faff around and don’t really care about in-game rewards for once, because the reward is playing the game itself. The reward is building a nice stone barrier on the riverbank to stop invasions from there. It’s building a zipline over the water to safely transport logs that you use to build something else over there. It’s rushing to an area, quickly building a treehouse, and then leaving in order to not draw attention to it. The reward is returning to your base at the very end of the game, and just tidying up for a couple more days before leaving for now. It’s discussing how one person always wanted a couch next to the campfire, so you spend one last afternoon building that couch, and then sitting there in front of the fire.
There is incredible freedom when it comes to building. You have your platforms, staircases, walls, roofs, ropes, and you can really combine them as you see fit. Check it out online, there are some really massive and impressive fortresses around. As far as we are concerned, we did not really want to go over the top, and kinda just role-played into what we would build in a situation like this. But even we built a nice log defensive wall, with one entrance that was filled with traps. We put two platforms on top of the wall so we can use our bows to shoot the enemy, would they ever come, and when we realised they can’t climb ropes, we put climbing ropes on the other end and that’s how we entered the basis from that side.
This sense of freedom is really everywhere in the game, I think it comes from the organic storytelling part. There is a certain natural obstacle in the island you have to overcome, not going to spoil what it is. The way we did it felt really wild, and I was sure that we just broke the rules, but no, most of the other solutions are even wilder. And in case you are wondering: we used a turtle shell. But if you wanted to build a 20-story high wooden platform, you could also do that, you just need to cut hundreds of trees to do that.
Through building your base, you can also freely play by your play style, we managed to find a really secluded place, we were very proud to find that on the first day, but we really pushed and worked for it. No, no, go further, we can’t stop here, let’s swim across that river, and then we can stop at the base of that cliff.
Crafting stuff is also quite satisfying. The game has the most inventive inventory I have ever seen, and I can’t believe this is not more widespread. Your inventory is basically all your stuff on a blanket, as if you unpacked your backpack, and looked at it. And you would assume that it gets cluttered after a while, but no, it keeps working perfectly.
All right, let’s close on a weird one: trees do not regrow in the game. Ever. Which is weird, I definitely read the opposite online, but it really made an interesting point about your presence on the island. My gamer instincts did not consider that to be an opportunity, so I cleared our whole area, and then we were left with no stick sources.
Good 5 – Horror
Now, the first thing I would like to clarify is that I am a person that gets scared very easily. Every group has that person who squeals like a pig when you watch horror movies, and in our group, that person is me. But I do love horror, I do love heavy atmospheres, and fearing the unknown. It’s primitive jump scares that I abhor.
With that out of the way, I think horror is handled exceptionally well in this game.
First off, no jump scares. Nada. Well, I mean, you can turn around, and there might be a scary person standing behind you with a hungry look in their eyes, but it’s all very natural, and not elevated by loud noises. They are just there. This natural, perverse “feeling at home” when it comes to the behaviour of the enemies is what did it for me. You remember that scene from the Signs when they watch the news, there is an amateur footage shown, and an alien just nonchalantly walks out of the bushes? I think that is one of the most brilliant horror scenes, and that is how it feels here. And when you venture down to the caves, man! You would expect to be attacked by Descent-monsters, but it actually rarely ever happens. It’s the constant threat that slowly grinds you down, you get very claustrophobic, there are wet rocks everywhere, water is dropping, your own footsteps echo, but nothing ever jumps in your face to scream in a scripted event. And I love it.
Second, enemies manage to be scary, even in broad daylight. There is something animalistic about the way they walk, you just look at them and feel threatened from your guts to your lizard brain. Sound design is great, the way they grunt and laugh maniacally reminds be a bit of the Borderlands mutants, just, you know, with some gravitas. And that first night when you glimpse them from the perceived safety of your house, pale figures moving in the moonlight, and as you step closer to the window, you realise that there is one looking right at you from an arm’s reach, and it slowly opens its mouth to scream and call the others… Man, that’s some effective scaring right there.
Third, the gore. The game is really gore-y, in fact it’s probably the most disgusting game we have ever played. You quite often stumble upon dead bodies, and their gruesome death is very graphically detailed and presented without any boundaries. All right, sexual organs are not shown, but that’s about it. It honestly borders on the torture porn level. But you know what? The game never stops doing it, it never apologises, and most importantly, it never jokes about it. The gore is constantly there, and it’s constantly heavy. The great thing that comes out of it is that you kinda become numb to all those mutilated body parts lying everywhere. Asking questions like who is the real monster here would obviously be dumb, I mean, the cannibal mutant monsters are the real monsters, but you do change over the course of the game. We really escalated from “keeping bunnies in nice little cages and not hurting them” to “asking each other not to leave mutilated body parts in the fire because we are eating there”. Oh yeah, you can also butcher the bodies you kill and use their parts in various ways, most importantly for bone armor, which is really effective, and, well, made of bones.
But once again, to me, the horror in this game was perfectly captured in that night on the treehouse when we were just quietly listening to the random noises, contemplating if we should try to make a run for it. If they can come up. If they can cut out the tree. Good stuff.
Good 6 – Difficulty
I loved the difficulty level in the game. Yes, it’s something of a trend with The Forest. I do love a lot of things about it.
First off, I love games with no difficulty setting. I mean, I pay you money, and you set the difficulty for me. It’s not like we have vastly different capabilities. Throw in a hardcore mode for the hardcore people and we’re done.
So, how good is this preset difficulty? Pretty good. On the one side, it’s not too easy. You can never ever just carelessly attack mutants. Sure, once you have good weapons, and a good sense of timing, you can take on five of them, but there might be another five very close. And if they finally decide to gang up on you, they will gang up on you HARD. At that point, your armor may as well be made of bread, and you die a very fast and unceremonious death. We did wage war on them, when we needed to collect their precious bones, but always on our own terms, with an easy escape route, amidst our traps, on a territory that we knew very well. Other than those occasions, whenever we had to cross into enemy territory, we just crawled in the bushes at the first sight of them. There is also a kinda final boss in the game, which in hindsight was great, and during the fight, I was convinced that we just can’t beat this thing, and we have to restart from ages ago. Which is the best type of excitement.
But the game is not too harsh either. Whenever we died and had to reload, it felt like we deserved it. And we were naturally inclined to play this game so cautiously that it only happened once or twice. You have your weapons to fight back, you can stand your ground if you are aptly prepared. I hate survival games where your only defense is a video camera and hiding in a cabinet, pissing yourself in fear – I don’t want to feel so helpless in my free time. Here, survival is all about planning, and careful execution of your plans. You can raid the villages for resources, you just have to know how and when. You can explore the caves, you just have to progress slowly, build up your lamp systems, etc. Oh, and the raw survival, eating and gaining shelter, is super easy in the game, but not exactly trivial. It’s like an anti Don’t Starve Together, which I really wanted to love, but I just constantly felt so miserable.
The Bad
Honestly, not much is wrong with The Forest. It’s mostly the occasional bugs and annoying little things. A few times we had to restart when I joined, and the logsled sometimes got stuck in the mud. Achievements are buggy, I definitely killed a bunny at some point, and yet no “Monster” achievement for me.
I did not like the weapon upgrade system, as it did not feel responsive. When you attach a feather to your weapon, its speed increases and the damage decreases, and the other way around with broken glass. The changes are very very minimal and I was never sure anything actually changed. Fortunately we found <good weapon that I’m not going to spoil> which you don’t have to upgrade.
Oh, you can’t pick a character, that’s a bit weird, and all the random characters are dudes. I think it would have been minimal work to make it customisable and have female characters.
And I can see some people having issues with this whole concept of civilised people going to native places and axing instead of asking. I am not overly sensitive to that stuff. Plus, I mean, they are mutant cannibal zombies.
The Co-Op
Yes, co-op is amazing in this game. You really are building together, and I felt like a deep camaraderie was established between characters. Which were not really characters, I really referred to them as “you” and “I”.
Immersion works super-duper well, rarely do you see this extent in co-op games. I mean, I know why it happens. The environment that you are in is inherently hostile and distant, and quite surreal. So talking to each other does not yank you out of the game world, on the contrary, it feels very natural. Because nobody else is talking to you. It makes me think of Stardew Valley, a greatly immersive gaming experience when you are on your own, which is completely ruined with another player. Forest is like the opposite of that.
And I am very glad to finally find a game where co-op crafting and base-building works. Too often did I feel before that it can never work, because we take away the opportunity from the other to try doing something, plus it’s very difficult to follow what the other player is doing. And here, somehow, it works. Granted, the crafting and building is not over-complicated, but still. It was really cool to build up our base together, to hunt, transfer dried meat to our secondary bases just in case we need to hide there later.
So yeah, absolutely amazing on that front.
The Recommendation
This game is a blast with two players, really outstanding experience.
Unfortunately, this is not your typical “couple game”, it is scary, and I would not like to play it alone. So if you are squeamish, this is probably not the game for you. But that is literally the only kind of players I would not recommend this game to, honestly, it’s the biggest surprise I have felt in a very long time.
The Forest came out of nowhere and took us by storm, no better words for it.
Info
| Release Year | 2018 |
| Genre | Crafting, Survival |
| Difficulty | Hard |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 37 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Amazing |
| Story | Great |
| Co-Operation | Amazing |