The Forest

 


The Forest seems like a typical enough mid 2010s survival game that was all the craze with games like DayZ, Rust, and so on. So much so that the first few times I played it, I kinda just spawned in the world, walked around doing nothing, then lost interest or quit because I thought there wasnt much to it. Well, years later I finally came back to the game with a buddy in co-op, because I noticed it was categorized as "Horror" on steam store, as well aside having over 400k reviews.  Thankfully, it isn't the case that its anything like those games, after beating the game I read the devs say they wanted it to be nothing like Rust and DayZ etc and more of a coherent, campaign focused experience.

The game starts off with a great premise, although typical enough. You're a plane passenger with your child, and the plane crashes onto some remote island. In the cutscene, you see some scary guy take your child. Then you wake up in the crashed plane, everyone is gone, with luggage everywhere and an axe to help yourself survive.

From here there is pretty much zero direction. The game is very open ended, thats both a positive and negative. Because initially we had the impression it was some kind of Minecraft survival game, where you need to sit there and just craft and build a base and do all that sorts of stuff. If you press B, you open up a much needed Survival Book that shows you all sorts of things you can craft, Log cabins, Fires, Furnatiure, even weird things that you have no idea what they do like Effigies and a SOS sign. So naturally since the game tells you to look at this stuff, we thought we were just supposed to craft. But it turns out, no, not really. The majority of things you can build here are just for roleplaying, filler, or aesthetic. We found that out soon enough, and then realized the real chunk of the game is actually exploring as much as possible, discovering all of the unique locations on the map.

Because you see you can craft these log cabins, beds, furnitures etc, but it doesn't really have any purpose. The game has a manual save system, where you must build any shelter then you can save or sleep. Well, its quite easy to build a cheap shelter anywhere you want, it only costs a few sticks and rocks. So once we figured this out, we basically abandoned all of the building crafting in favor of building tiny little hits scattered all around the map, acting only as save points - That's all you need. Once we figured this out, the game got more exciting because now it wasn't about just surviving, but exploring and progressing the plot.

Yes, unlike other stupid never-ending early access games of the time, this game actually has a plot, and an ending. Luckily theres a 'To-do' list in your Survival book, that jots down objectives, and crosses them off as you complete them. This is extremely useful. At the start of the game, it just says things like "Find timmy"  "Find the passengers"  but as you explore, you start getting objectives such as "Explore this cave"   "Find a way to breathe underwater"  and right in the middle of the map is this giant sinkhole that tells you "Find a way to get into the sinkhole"  which is one of the biggest plot points and objectives in the game. So although the game has basically zero handholding and direction, atleast you feel like youre making progress by looking at this Todo list and with the knowledge that exploring lets you unlock new objectives.

At first, the island seems rather peaceful. The graphics and sound are very immersive, although its a Unity engine game which can have some bad rep for being asset flips, the graphics quality here and overall polish is quite good. It's got really impressive lighting and shaders and the sound effects of the enviornment and wind and ruffling through your backpack really lets you feel like you're in this world lost and alone.  Though you can sense something sinister is happening apart from how pleasent it may at first seem.

The suspsense at first builds, you can see these weird totems around the map that show signs that something is gone wrong here. Sooner than later you get these insane mutant-like cannibalistic tribes attacking you and stalking you. At first its terrifying and I actually let out a yelp when I saw one. That's because the AI here is pretty damn good and immersive too. The AI isn't your typical game AI where it just constantly attacks you once it spots you - No, the cannibals will stalk you, stare you down, Fake attacking you, they'll run at you, then last minute juke you out and run backwards just to fuck with you and confuse you. Sometimes, even, if you don't back down and simply just stare back at them and hold your ground, they'll respect you and run away. It feels like you're actually dealing with this half animal half human hybrid that has their own individual emotions and reactions. Apparently, even small things like attacking women cannibals infront of the male ones, makes the males even more enranged and aggressive. I read that the developers put in "Fuzzy programming" for the AI, so although theres general rules, they can randomly break them and act completely unpredictable.  Sometimes they wont even attack you at all, and act friendly or indifferent. There's even this item you can find around the map, Red Paint, that covers your character in paint that appears to make the cannibals not hostile to you, or very much less aggressive.

The combat here is pretty standard, you have a stamina meter, and you just click to swing your melee weapon, or you can right click to block. I never found blocking all that useful but that might just be a me issue. The combat is decent enough, it does its job, but its not amazing or anything. You kinda just sprint up to them and swing your axe or weapon, run backwards, wait for them to attack, rinse repeat until dead. But the AI is what really enhances the whole experience and how unpredictable and "lifelike" they can be.

As for other mutants besides the cannibal tribes, thats where the real horror comes in. As you explore the game and realize that a lot of the progress and content takes place in dark underground caves, you lurk around in the darkness only with your lighter (which is infinite, which I kinda felt weird about because why would you assume your lighter is infinite in such a situation? the consistency of the game design and how much things make sense is a bit hit and miss) but as you explore these caves you find really insane shit like crazy deformed hulking monsters with multiple legs and arms, tiny deformed babies jumping at you and attacking you, all sorts of crazy shit. The first time I went down into a cave and saw one of these things I gasped and it totally annihilated me, great moment.

The way death works in this game is whenever you die, you seem to respawn right back at the plane, as a new passenger, you lose all your items (though I think you can go back to get them) and your survival book goes back to saying Days Survived: 0.  Though, I never let this happen, because whenever I died I simply quit to main menu and loaded my save. Since the game has a manual save system like that, I always made sure to just build a savepoint before anything dangerous or any major progress so I could load later if I died or something like that.

So the bulk of the game is actually just exploring as much of the map as possible, building save points, being attacked by cannibal tribes, and exploring caves. To accomodate all this, the game has an extensive inventory system. You press I and open up a screen that shows all of your items laid out on a tarp, though unlike other games it isn't simply a matter of how much weight you're holding, or how many slots your items are taking up - No, the way the inventory works is that every type of item has its own slot, and you can individually max out as many of those items per slot as it allows. For example, you have a Stick slot, a Rock slot, a Meds slot, a Cloth slot, and so on, and each of these can hold up to a certain amount. I think it works quite well and is a bit unique to how other inventory systems work. It looks cool to open up your inventory and see all your items laid out onto this tarp and you can look at them individually ,usually they have a little tooltip attached to them that can give you a clue of what the item is used for. Though, the system isn't perfect. It can be a bit clunky trying to switch back and forth from your lighter, and different weapons or items. Apparently you can assign hotkeys to different items but I never figured it out, that should tell you how obtuse some of it can be. Something pretty strange is the fact you cant really drop items, like if your co-op friend wants some food or drink you have, you have to put it on a metal tray, then equip the tray  and pass it to him. It's pretty funny but doesn't make much sense. I guess its some kind of technical flaw they didnt want the player to drop items everywhere or something?

Inside the inventory screen you can craft all sorts of things, but I didn't realize how until like halfway through the game. That should tell you how hit and miss some of the explainations for the mechanics are. I found out if you right click items and select them, then hover over them, it will tell you a list of things you can craft with it and the items needed. Stuff like crafting a bow, a new axe, molotovs, a water holder, new armors, etc. I didn't find much of the crafting all too mandatory but often times I did craft a few simple things. I like that it isn't nessesary at all and you can just get by without engaging in much crafting OR base building so its not like a Minecraft kind of game at all, thankfully, it's all optional.

Since it is a survival game, of course you have a food and water meter. These are no joke, the more you sprint and work yourself out, the more they deplete. You have to be constantly opening all the luggae you find cause they can contain snack bars and soda drinks which are very useful to keep your thirst and hunger up. Besides those, of course you can hunt and cook food on fires. But what I realized halfway through the game is also you can cut the limbs off killed enemy cannibals and cook and eat those, too. So for a big chunk of the game I was in turn being a cannibal like my enemies, eating their arms and legs in a weird ironic circle, now I'm just like them. I'm not sure if engaging in cannibalism has any negative effects, but it seemed to do the job just fine. The food and drink system adds immersion to the game and isn't to much of an annoyance unlike other survival games, its fun to ask your friend for food and vice versa, when you start to run down to your last few candy bars its like "Ok who gets it, me or you?" can be funny times.

So we realized to progress the game, you bascially have to find these Caves or unique locations on the map. one standout location on the map is the Yacht, which isn't too hard to spot. Near the costline is a boat you can swim to, inside it you find scary photos of monsters and food and supplies. There are lots of these cannibal villages around the map that usually have victims hung up, mutilated or killed around them. I guess they're plane passengers. One of the todo list objectives is 'Find plane passengers' and usually when you find these human victims, it will say Passenger # found. Can give a eerie sinister feeling to discover all these passengers around the map and how they met their demise to the canniabls. The game is really gorey and has awesome raphics in this department you can find all sorts of twisted different ways the cannibals tortured these passengers, just weird things like shoving phones in their mouth or tennis rackets, it has a lot of enviornmental story telling and exploring everywhere never got dull or boring because theres always something crazy to see or some mini-story that gets told to you.

You don't even start the game with a map, but hopefully sooner than later you find the cave that has it in it. We found that cave a few hours in, I can't remember exactly which one but yeah you explore these caves and they have vital mandatory progress items and weapons, the map being one of them. Once we had the map now it was just a journey to try to read the map and uncover as much of it as possible and find as many caves as possible. So after this point we would just run around circles on the map looking for caves. The map isn't extremely huge either, which works in its favor, you can walk from one side of the map tothe other in about 10 minutes.  I think the game has 10 or so caves and you'll need to explore just about all of them to complete the game, atleast the first time.

So we kept finding these caves and exploring them. They can be extremely elaborate with multiple branching paths, they're all really dark and full of cannibals and crazy mutants too. It gives a real suspenseful horror vibe especially when you can come across more of these plane passengers all mutilated and tortured inside of them too, its just a terrifying setting. Thankfully we didn't get lost or stuck too many times, the enviornmental design is good enough here where it tries to put memorable landmarks in certain places so everything doesn't end up looking the same. Things like campsites, strings of teeth hanging from walls, certain gore scenes, let you know which part of the cave you're in and keeps it from being all the same and helps navigation. Exploring these caves was some of the best parts of the game because it gives you a real sense of dread and horror being stuck down here in the dark , lost and confused with nothing but your lighter that sometimes flicks off (though you can get a flashlight eventually), surrounded by gore and these cannibals and mutants. It's awesome.

Eventually from these caves you find things like a Katana, all sorts of photos and notes and drawings, a VHS camcorder, cassette tapes, video tapes, a Keycard which is mandatory for progress, some scuba gear that lets you swim underwater which is also mandatory, and a climbing axe.

At first we found a cave with yellow ropes on the walls, we werent sure what it meant or how to use it. We thought we had to craft something, couldnt figure it out. So reluctantly googled it, turns out you need a Climbing axe. So we just kept exploring until we found the climbing axe, and yeah eventually found it without having to look it up. You shouldn't have to look up too many things in this game ,which is impressive for how little handholding it does. The major thing that i thought was kinda janky or clumsy was the Sinkhole. So the Sinkhole is this giant chasm in the middle of the map, and the endgame is finding a way to the bottom of it. Well at first, you can go in caves that lead you midway down the sinkhole and its just a dead end. So its like what? Am I suppose to like glitch my way down the wall?  Cause it actually works, you can kinda slide yourself down the mountain wall but that just doesnt seem right, is it? I had to look it up and apparently theres like 20 ways to actually get into the sinkhole, but they all seem like glitches or not 'Canon'. Theres only one real 'canon' intended way to get in there, and its from a cave. Theres a cave that leads you all the way to the bottom, so we found that instead.

Once you have certain items like the Climibing axe, scuba gear, you can get to the bottom of the sinkhole and access the endgame. You climb through a certain cave, make your way to the bottom, after swimming underwater a bunch which is a pretty cool mechanic how at first you couldnt see anything under water and it made you wonder if theres anything down there,  and then you can finally swim underwater and use a flashlight down there. Well you eventually come across this high-tech laboratory at the bottom of the cave (bit cliche isnt it? but still works)  and you use the keycard you found to open the door and walk in.

From here the story unravels and I won't explain it all but you learn a bit about how these people are doing genetic experiments and are intentionally shooting down airplanes to kidnap children and harvest their life force or some shit. The plot is quite fascinating and fun to discover, I like how theres virtually no talking in almost the whole game but the plot unfolds through finding items and watching VHS tapes and enviornmental storytelling, its really atmospheric.

Though unfortunately the last segment of the game really annoyed us because it was like one fumbling mess after another. First of all the segment with Timmy was glitched up and broken for the co-op partner and was a confusing mess because of it, had to watch it on youtube. Then, the last boss is this giant mutant monster thing that has tons of health that makes you engage in really clumsy awkward combat, and to make matters worse, it completely contradicts the entire games mechanics and philosophy by if you die, now you dont actually die, you just wake up outside the boss room and can just die over and over with no penalty. What? doesnt make any fuckin sense. So you kinda just awkwardly try killing this boss, throwing molotvs at it, shooting it with your bow, dying over and over throwing your corpse at it til its dead. Weird, but okay. But then right at the end of the game it presents you with two options. One option is to push a button and intentionally blow up a plane, continuing the cycle, and the other button is to shut it all down. Naturall we chose the second button to stop it, but we missed the fact that the first button shooting down the plane apparently saves Timmy. We missed that fact because the only way you know is a sign pops up "Live sample required" on a screen above Timmy, but we missed it or didn't understand it.

So basically, the "alternate" ending is bullshit and doesnt actually end the game. It makes you run all the way back to the yacht, grab a keycard, run all the way back to the cave, just to get some optional cube item thing that does nothing but is fun to play with, theres no end credits, no achievement. nothing. This is the "Free roam" mode. What I think happened is the game only had one ending for a long time, actually ending the game not letting you play anymore, and people complained so they added in a second alternate ending letting you keep playing. Well the design here is clumsy and they should have tucked the alt ending away somewhere harder to find because basically for a first play through you shouldnt press it.

If you press the 'canon' shoot down the plane button, the game actually immediately ends, you get a ending cutscene, which is completely off-tone almost like a humouros talk show appearance where apparently you get off the island and are some famous book author now? its really stupid and seemed like a joke, like what?  but yeah then end credits roll, achivement, and kicks you back to main menu. Okay, fair enough, but the whole alternate ending button just led to total confusion, fucked us around and wasted 2 hours extra of our time for no reason. So yeah the entire like last 5% of the game is pretty annoying and clunky. It's cool in concept and visuals, it can just be annoying to play atleast the first time.

So thats The Forest, whenever you hear the term "Survival Horror"  this game is actually survival horror in the strictest sense. To top it off, its fully co-op. One last note on the co-op, its a typical co-op system, you can help your buddy when he "dies" he falls to the ground you can pick him up. Other than that you can see his nametag on screen at all times so if you ever get lost you can just run to his nametag. So the co-op system works good enough. So yeah its just a good atmospheric immersive co-op horror game.

8/10