Survival games have a particular design that, while promising open and changing gameplay, is relatively restrictive when you look into its design principles. Survival games are meant to be open ended, with worlds full of craftable resources and harsh elements. You are meant to fight for persistence in this world by using your abilities to manage your various meters always inching downward towards death. Survival games are, in essence, games that aren't meant to have a definite meaning. They are systems set to balance on top of one another and you are tasked with managing them.
It is an interesting conceit to take a genre that would seem to be poorly suited for a narrative or goal driven plot and give it just that. I love survival games inherently, because I love managing a myriad of systems and love making my way through various tech trees trying to better automate my life, or make it to the next branch of technology that allows me to better explore the world. The Forest upends a lot of those notions of the survival game in order to feel focused, to give you a goal with an end and to utilize the systems within the survival genre to act as means to that goal.
In The Forest you play as a father who is on a plane with your young son, Timmy, when your plane suddenly crashes. You wake among the wreckage with your son (and most of the passengers on the plane) missing, on a forested peninsula in which you will need to survive. Finding where Timmy has gone is complicated, as first you will need to make a shelter and find food and water. Soda cans, alcohol, and even medication can be found in various camp sites on the peninsula, long abandoned and, by the looks of things, ravaged by the locals. It doesn't take long into the game before these locals make themselves known.
The peninsula of The Forest is inhabited by a tribe of cannibals, and these cannibals are as interested in the meat on your bones as they are in you as a stranger. The Forest plays out like an odd cross between a survival game and a horror game, two genres that go so well together I'm surprised I haven't seen more games in the same vain (not including zombies because, let's face it, zombies are almost never scary). The cannibals have an odd AI, somewhere between terrible and brilliant. They can be relatively easy to take care of once you've progressed far enough into the game, but their AI can also be unpredictable. It is not uncommon to be chopping down trees and suddenly notice three of them standing at the top of a hill, watching you. It's eerie, and places a constraint on your actions, because if you get too close to them, they may attack, and turning your back to them may cause them to rush you. You can't ever be sure of exactly what they will do. Sometimes pointing a bow at them will cause them to retreat a little into the forest. Other times it will leave you open to one slinking up behind you. While walking through the woods, you can hear them call to one another, which may mean a group might be on your trail, or it may mean they've found your camp and are attempting to destroy your drying rack full of food.
The cannibals in The Forest add an interesting twist to survival gameplay. While you could pick one base and fortify it, upkeeping the various traps and walls needed to keep out unwanted visitors, being in one place too long will attract more and more cannibals at higher and higher frequencies, encouraging you to play far more nomadic. This makes the crafting part of the game something quick and as-needed, an interesting take on a genre that has routinely been about stockpiling and fortifying to the point of little threat. This nomadic life serves another purpose as well, encouraging you to explore the world you're in. Exploring makes it inevitable that you will eventually find one of the many entrances into the sprawling cave system.
The caves are incredibly dark and full of enemies, but they also boast some of the best loot in the game. To progress you will need certain objects such as the climbing hook or a diver's rebreather, all of which are found in the caves. Drawings and notes can be found as well, piecing together the story as you explore. It goes without saying, but something weird is going on or was going on in this peninsula, and discovering what that may be is a lot of the fun of The Forest.
That focus is what makes the game so unique, and one of the better survival games I've played in a while. It is interesting to see what a direction can do with a genre, even as it upends certain known aspects. For example, while The Forest could be endless if you so wanted it to be, the game is heavily encouraging you to progress through the story. The peninsula is small, only with a handful of locations, and can be spanned in about one in game day. There are some interesting secrets to uncover that will unlock some truly ridiculous crafting recipes, for those that wish to stay and play in this sandbox, but it is obviously discouraged by the constraints of the game. There are hard limits to what you can carry, making building anything a management of resources within a much more narrow field than most survival games.
Everything in The Forest that is craft-able is aesthetically represented with what materials were used to build it. Rather than grabbing a hundred wood and being able to make a log cabin, in The Forest you need actual logs, of which you can only carry two at a time, which come from chopping down trees. You can build a log sled with sticks that can help your building go faster, but sticks are also needed to build the cabin in the first place. It's a neat literal translation from crafting material to crafted object that gives a sense of reality to a game that is still rather gamey. Likewise, the game's aesthetic goes for realism, allowing night to be almost unbearably dark and day to be washed out by sunlight. It is one of the best depictions of wilderness I can think of, matching up so well with my experience that I almost felt the sun beating down on me as I rustled my through brush looking for blueberries. The aesthetic does a lot for your immersion, but the sound design sends it into the atmosphere. The wind will brush plant life and hiss in your ears realistically. Chopping down trees lets out loud, rounded thumps that sound as though they carry farther than you'd be comfortable with on a cannibal infested peninsula. There's an inclusiveness that you feel apart of in its design that really sells this world, even as the game starts to tip into conspiracy as you progress.
The Forest was made by a team of four, and as such has a myriad of glitches you will have to be patient with. There are collectibles that would sometimes glitch out, some of the physics would turn severe, and in general it seems the game is only loosely being held together. It makes sense, as most if not all survival crafting games I've played have felt this way (the only exception coming to mind is Subnautica, but even that has performance hiccups here and there), but it can briefly disrupt what is otherwise an incredibly immersive game. The story will also more than likely leave you without much sense of overarching meaning. The plot is interesting, but I felt as though what made it interesting took a back seat in favor of a smaller story with questionable ethics that tried less to provoke and more to cinch everything up into a conclusion. Still, there are elements within that make the concise nature of it more than just it's definite conclusion.
The Forest can be difficult if playing alone, and too easy if playing in multiplayer, but will still be rewarding regardless. It shows what a contextualizing agent can do to focus a game's mechanics into something more than just their surface appeal. It allows for everything to feel more synchronized, to give a sense of progress outside of just mechanical knowledge, and gives a fullness to the experience that can often feel thin in games such as Ark. The messy aspects of The Forest pale against the great, and it stands as one of my favorite games in the genre to date. Here's hoping the upcoming sequel retains what was good about the original, while expanding on the odd lore that I only got to briefly pass through.
8.5
No comments:
Post a Comment