Mercifully, this did not take more than three months to beat. BACKGROUND:
This was the next game my college friend group wanted to tackle as the next big co-op game we'd tackle together. I was on the fence about joining in (we hadn't finished Raft when everyone else bought the game in preparation), but like true friends, the others dragged me kicking and screaming through Steam's ability to gift people games. Many thanks, you manipulative sons of bitches! PLOT: I went into this not really expecting a plot, so I was quite surprised to see how deep the lore goes. The basic premise is that you're former reality TV star Eric LeBlanc, and your plane has crashed on a mysterious forest. You wake up to find your son Timmy is missing, and you must find him fast. You'll quickly find that this forest is full of horrible dangers like cannibals, as well has horrific mutant abomination that look like disgusting amalgamations of random body parts. Along the way, you'll pick up pieces of lore that reveal the dark history of the island, from the supernatural secrets it hides, the true origins of the mutants, and the people who used to explore the area (both in the distant past, and in recent times). These story bits seem disconnected, but finding enough details reveals a shocking tale that ties most of these details together, and it paints a disturbing picture. Even more shocking is the possibility that the very circumstances the protagonist finds himself in may not be just a freak accident. Unfortunately, a lot of the narrative is up to the player to figure out, either by observing the environment, or picking up lore items in the world (most of which are optional). Again, not the most popular storytelling method for a lot of people, but I personally found it rewarding to piece as much of the story together as we could. I thought the lore was overall interesting, and I liked the surprise of the events that occur to your character and the story details we found turned out to be interconnected. The game has two endings, with one being the definitive canon ending, and the other allowing players to continue their playthrough in a sort of endless mode. The former will probably not sit well as a choice for many people (our group only agreed upon it for its canonicity), but it sets up the sequel (which has been confirmed). The latter made more sense to us as a narrative choice, but since it doesn't really go anywhere (you just continue playing as before), it may not end up being a satisfying ending for some in that respect. PRESENTATION: This game boasts almost AAA levels of visual fidelity, which goes rather well with its highly realistic style. There's a respectable amount of polish to everything (even little things like brushing against foliage are animated, for example), and a level of detail that I could probably describe as "gruesome." The violence you must to inflict on cannibals to defend yourself will look gnarly and bloody, and the mutants you'll run into look downright hideous. Warning to the squeamish. The lighting in particular is where shit gets too real, as when it's dark at night, it's fucking dark as shit. This can make gameplay mildly inconvenient, but my friends found a workaround by adjusting some graphics settings that mitigate the darkness. There's not much in the way of music, with more ambient environmental sounds and effects being the more dominant audio aspect. The sounds of the forest are mostly on the subdued side, and it feels simultaneously natural and eerie. The only things that'll break the silence are the wails of the various enemies you'll have to face, and they all sound quite unsettling (the mutants in particular sound extra freaky). Other sound effects sound pretty close to realistic, which is impressive (or, in the case of weapons hitting cannibal flesh, disturbing). There's little to no voice acting, either, apart from the grunts of the player character (which do well to get across the amount of effort he puts into swinging weapons, or the pain he's in when he's getting his ass kicked). GAMEPLAY: The Forest is a first-person survival game with a lot of the mechanics you can expect from similar titles in the genre. As such, you can expect things such as crafting, exploration, base-building, and combat. The game's world is modestly large (but nowhere near close to something like Breath of the Wild), and there's plenty to find in it. As the name may suggest, most of the world is indeed forest, but you can also encounter coastal areas, bodies of freshwater, snowcapped mountains, incredibly dark caves, abandoned camps, and even cannibal settlements. It can be quite tricky to keep track of your location while exploring (especially in caves, which are actually an interconnected network on top of being dark as shit), but thankfully you can find or craft items that make navigation easily. Exploring the world is key, as many useful and important items can be found by looking around. First, you can live off the land and get materials like logs, sticks, and rocks that you can use for crafting. You can also find animals that you can kill for their hides and for their meat. You can even encounter manmade items, like supplies from the plane crash, and tools left behind by past explorers (from a breathing apparatus that will help you breathe underwater, to valuable utilities like flares, and even weapons). Lastly, you can run into cannibals, whose corpses you can burn so you can use their bones and skulls for armor and weapons. What's surprising to me was how much of the game's world was for optional stuff. Only a couple of caves and landmarks were critical to the game's story, while the bulk of it is simply for nice-to-have items. We went out of our way for these optional areas, and I found it worthwhile both for the gameplay-related stuff we found as well as the bits of lore that we encountered. Crafting was initially confusing, as the game splits it up between two menus. There's a separate menu for crafting structures, divided into straightforward categories, and all you have to do is set down where you want it and provide the necessary materials. The other side of crafting involves going into your inventory, where you select items to combine. Doing so will reveal the recipes for various things such as tools, weapons, and convenient utilities such as bags that increase carrying capacity for certain items. I found this latter one somewhat counterintuitive at first, because you had to know what the raw materials for things at first, but this was assuaged quickly when I figured out that you can view all possible recipes an item can be used for by selecting just one item. The structures you can make are fairly diverse. You can make fires for light and warmth, drying racks and water collectors for sustenance, storage for raw materials, traps to dispatch unwitting cannibals, camps to save and sleep in, and structures for custom setups like foundations, walls, and ceilings. I must admit I underestimated the possibilities for base-building in this game until my more construction-savvy friends started building three-floor buildings and a whole zipline setup to move us between our two bases. There are also a few options for purely cosmetic decorations, though we didn't really mess around with these too much (except for the gazebo; I thought it was hilarious that it was even a thing in the game). Inventory crafting is more or less what I expected. You can make a lot of the usual shit, with some added mechanics like weapon upgrades (something I found interesting) and modifications, and the aforementioned item capacity expansions. Perhaps my only real issue is how disorganized the actual inventory screen is; it took me quite a while to figure out where everything was. I wished it were sorted more properly if they weren't going to give players the option to sort the inventory themselves. Certain items lend themselves to special interactions, like being able to stoke fires with leaves, filling pots with food or water and being able to place them on fires to cook/boil stuff, sending logs down ziplines for convenient transportation, or resetting triggered traps with sticks. Most amusing to us was the ability to use turtle shells as sleds to go down slopes or decrease fall damage. You can even do things like breeding rabbits and raising a garden of plants (which is certainly not unheard of in games of this genre, but I personally didn't expect it here). There's a surprising amount of depth to the game thanks to these little interactions, and I appreciate that. There's a decent variety of flora and fauna you can encounter. Most things serve an expected purpose (i.e. a food source), but certain animals provide hides/coats that are valuable crafting materials on top of the meat you can harvest. Plants are much the same, but you can encounter poisonous berries that you really shouldn't eat, but can be used for tipping weapons with poison, a feature I found really neat in particular. Combat is more or less simple, with a small handful of weapons you can craft or find (axes, spears, bows, clubs, and even bladed weapons like machetes), each with a basic attack and a guard to block incoming damage. As straightforward as it is, you can get rather creative when fighting, since you can craft burning weapons for incendiary damage, tip arrows with poison, and even do things like charge a club swing or throw your spear like a javelin at enemies. You can even craft Molotov cocktails, create explosives that stick onto enemies, and even find stuff like flares or dynamite to really lay the smackdown on enemies. Our group found a particular sick enjoyment out of setting one another on fire with Molotovs, because we're all just a bunch of fucking griefers. The enemies you can encounter either fall into the cannibal category and the mutant category. Cannibals generally fight the same across the board, attacking in groups, charging savagely at players, and occasionally dodging your attacks like they're in a fucking Dark Souls game. Some of the cannibals use clubs, others can also throw fire, and there's a chance they can revive downed allies, which meant we had to quickly dispatch the entire group before we get overwhelmed. Apart from that, they're generally no trouble unless you get swarmed by five or six of them (and even then, you can use shit like fire to fuck them up). Killing cannibals not only keeps you alive, but you can burn their corpses for bones (which I mentioned earlier). Additionally, you can sever their limbs. Why? Because... you can eat them. Yes, you can become a cannibal yourself. I went out of my way to hunt animals just so our group didn't have to go full cannibal, because as handy as it is to have human parts to eat in a pinch, it's still pretty messed up to me. Mutants are a little tougher, since they hit hard, their movements are difficult to stifle, and take a good amount of damage to take down. They were scary to encounter at first, but we quickly figured out that the combination of fire and ranged attacks are extremely effective at taking them down, and since we usually attack as a team, these abominations rarely ever got the jump on us. Eventually, we could beat these guys solo, since pretty much all their attacks are telegraphed and are easy to avoid if you just keep distance. Though we found our groove against these hostiles relatively quickly, we still had to exercise a bit of caution when fighting since these freaks can wreck the structures we built, and recrafting/repairing them can take some effort. In practice, however, it was usually us that tend to destroy our own structures since we can sometimes be careless about where we swing our weapons. Enemy spawn behavior and frequency ramp up over time, as mutants become more common the longer you go, and cannibals habitually patrol the forest and get curious the more you chop down trees. It eventually got to the point where multiple mutants would launch an assault on our base, making for quite the exciting battle. Your character has a whole bunch of stats that you can keep track of, but the most important are hunger and thirst (both straightforward), and stamina. Stamina's split into two bars, interestingly enough: one bar decreases when you perform strenuous actions (swinging weapons, sprinting, climbing, etc.) and slowly regenerates when you take it easy. The other stamina bar decreases more slowly, but it determines how full the first bar is, which means the less full this second bar is, the less stamina you can actually spend at a time. Unlike the first stamina bar, this second bar doesn't regenerate over time, and you have to sleep or sit on benches to restore it. I found this to be an interesting take on stamina management; you actually have to take time to restore the second max stamina bar or else you won't have the capacity to keep sprinting or be effective in combat. There are also a bunch of other status ailments you can run into (infections, poisoning), but our group generally did a decent job avoiding getting them (and even if we did, we could sleep it off or craft special healing items to cure ourselves). The game also keeps track of other, more complicated stats like weight, athleticism, and sanity, but we observed that these mechanics were never fleshed out well enough to impact our gameplay, meaning there was no point to manage them. I wonder how they'd have affected survival if they had been implemented more fully. We obviously played this game co-op, where we got to do our usual divide and conquer approach (some of us build, others explore, I hold down the fort), but it's entirely possible to play this game single player. In fact, one of my friends did a solo playthrough in between co-op sessions, and they got through the game pretty quickly since they didn't take time to do all the base-building and general fucking around that we do in co-op. There are also alternate game modes outside of the normal mode we played. There's peaceful for people who just want to explore without having to worry about running into hostiles, hard modes for ones seeking a challenge, and a creative mode for those who want to push the limits of the game's structure system. VERDICT: Although many elements of The Forest aren't treading new ground in terms of survival game mechanics, I still had a great time with the game. I liked the small but meaningful twists on established mechanics (weapon upgrades, the stamina split), neat structure additions like ziplines, and the amount of optional points of exploration despite the relatively small world size. I had a blast playing this game with my friends; teaming up on mutants felt great, exploring the world together felt like an adventure, and piecing together the surprisingly rich lore was rewarding. If you're looking for a survival game that you can enjoy with friends that has a healthy mix of combat, base-building, and exploration, this is a pretty solid game to try out. I don't think it'll be the most innovative experience for most people, but some players may get a kick out of the story, find some satisfaction in fighting mutants, or enjoy the game's custom building features. My main caveat for the curious would be the graphic nature of some visuals and actions you perform in the game; chopping up cannibal limbs looks pretty nasty in the game's realistic style. Pick up The Forest on Steam here: The Forest on Steam (steampowered.com) - end -
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June 2024
Derryck
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