The Forest is a survival horror game. That sentence alone might be enough to turn some of you off of it but bare with me, at least for a little while.



Now something you might notice in that trailer is the phrase "open world" and that's true. You crash land in an awful but amazing place and you must survive, not only that, but there is a goal to rescue somebody. The game is still in early alpha and I don't know if there is a way to 'win', I doubt it though. My experience also differed from the trailer, but I'll get into that shortly. The best explanation I can give, from what I've read, is that the plane can crash in different locations on the island, I just crashed in an unfortunate one and made a series of poor decisions that made sense at the time.



This trailer is far more accurate to my experience, but I was not nearly as prepared or well equipped as that person. Or competent. Very much less competent. The game is in prealpha so let's talk about the bugs and problems. If you haven't been chased off by the concept or the trailers, I think you'll likely be the sort who buys the game, at least when it's on sale and finished. Main bug, the pause feature is very troubled, that is to say, things pause, everything pauses except for the health meters. This means that you can eat, pause for awhile, come back and die of hunger. A lot of objects in the world don't quite exist. You can sometimes interact with them and sometimes walk through them. This is fine for bushes but less good for trees and boulders. The tribespeople are unaffected by deep water. I mean that quite literally, they just follow the slope down as they walk along or chase you so while you struggle to float in the water, they'll be down below you hooting and hollering and dancing around waving clubs. I still don't understand the tree falling physics which makes chopping them down a delight and a terror. When I got knocked out the first time, I slid several yards on my feet before the fall animation went off. The controls are not intuitive or optimized for a game like this. I still haven't figured out how to drop things or quickly switch items, or put items away. I died because I couldn't put my lighter away or turn it off, I'll say that. I don't like the inventory button on the wrong half of the keyboard either, 'I' makes sense for Inventory in a game with a lot of buttons everywhere. But I'd like to switch 'I' to 'Tab' because my hand is on the wrong half of the keyboard for that button and my other hand is desperately looking for sneaky tribal people about to bash my brains in.



That trailer is what I saw first and I bought the game right off. I am going to warn you right now, that guy was a god. I can't even imagine building that much, let alone doing it successfully. Now that I've played the game, when the fence is destroyed, it feels like a punch in the gut. That's two trees worth of logs that had to be cut and dragged over to put that there. Just for those six beams, though maybe you can put them back up, I don't know. At this point, I think it's time to tell you my story.

So skipping the cutscene stuff, like the plane crash and the kidnapping, I found myself in a forest with a lake off in the distance. Having collected a lot of soda, eaten all the airplane food, and picked up a handy dandy ax, I set off to see what I could see. One thing I saw was a campsite with three tents, it looked quite lovely, right on the edge of the lake. At the very least, I could find some supplies. Halfway there, I spotted several large tribal people walking through it, one of them wearing a bunch of arms strapped to his back. I hid and tried to sneak away. I had moved a fair ways when I walked through a large bush with white stuff growing. I tried to collect the stuff and I think my character sneezed. It didn't sound quite like a sneeze and since everything was dead silent, I nearly wet myself before I ran for my life.

I finally decided that I needed a shelter, a place I could defend, retreat to. This is the first of my bad decisions that made sense at the time. I found a cliff face, I thought it was the cave but that was just shadows playing tricks on me. There were a few large boulders that were solid and I built my shelter against one. By keeping my back to the wall, I could keep every thing in view, nothing could sneak up on me. There was another large rock that meant there were two pathways to my shelter and I built a small fire on the edge of one of them so that it was hidden. This was perfect, there was no reason they'd pay any attention or notice my little shelter. I didn't realize that less than twenty yards from my small alcove was a major pathway for the tribal gathering parties. So patrols of two or three, including the man with extra arms, stopped by every morning and 9 or 10 passed by every late afternoon.

My second mistake was cutting down a tree. I needed logs and sticks but the sound attracted some tribal people and it was a very tense and unpleasant standoff for about two seconds before I ran. One of them chased me. I got to a small dead end and was forced to face him. I barely managed to kill him with the ax. So I made a resolution, this was my next terrible good idea. I would cut down trees far away from my camp so as not to attract tribals to it. This meant a lot of walking and dragging of logs. It all went bad on the fourth day. I was gathering logs when I heard a shrieking sound. I turned and found a tribal looking at me. Then a woman stepped out of the trees on my left, then the man with arms on my right. I dropped the log I was dragging and ran. They chased after me. Occasionally I'd spin and swing my ax but it did little. Finally I hit the edge of the lake and they hadn't given up, I could see my campsite, I had one trap but the woman was blocking my path. I decided to fight, maybe she'd run if I killed the men. So I turned and started swinging the ax like a madman. Then I got wise and swung it when they were jumping at me. I killed the man and the woman ran away, but the guy with the arms still kept on attacking me. I finally knocked him to the ground, then he started to get back up. I admit, I panicked again. So full body chop, like I was chopping logs for the fire right onto his back. At that moment everything in my brain was screaming to go for the spine. He started to get up again. Full chop. His body was twitching and I thought he was getting up again so I chopped him again. Then again. Then a third time and he split in half. I had about an eight of a second to realize what I'd done before the woman hit me in the head with a large rock from behind. That knocked me out. I woke up in a dark cave, starving, badly hurt, without my ax, so I lit my lighter, walked two steps before bumping into a tribal with either a headlamp or glowing eyes. Then it killed me.

I'm definitely going to keep playing this game. It's neat, it scares the hell out of me. If this sounds fun to you, check out a few playthroughs on youtube. I'll likely add my own soon enough.