However, I do wish sanity had more noticeable impact on how you play – other than unlocking the ability to build effigies out of body parts to mark your territory when it gets below a certain point, the difference between 100 percent sane and zero felt pretty negligible. The final moments of the story tie up the question of how much of your humanity you’re willing to lose to survive with an interesting moral choice. On top of your food and water gauges, a sanity score tracks how far you’re willing to go to survive, up to and including going native and cannibalizing the cannibals. Make no mistake, though – you will more likely than not need to rely at least partly on community info to reach the end. The relatively small size of the map compared to other survival games is also a boon, making it more likely you’ll find at least some of the story areas without having to dive into a wiki. The mysteries go deep and take you to some very unexpected environments that excitingly contrast the arboreal overworld and natural cave systems.
It’s a multi-layered and creepy slow burn, doled out through abandoned camcorder tapes, disturbing discoveries, and clues left behind by your son who was kidnapped just after the plane crash that stranded you. The story you discover down in those depths is worth the trek.The story you discover down in those depths is worth the trek.
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The cave cannibals seem scripted to flank, disorient, and spook you with their erratic movements rather than going straight for the kill, which is further proof that the team behind The Forest has a strong understanding of how to inspire horror. This led to some wonderfully heart-pounding situations in which I was plunged into total darkness, knowing there were cannibals stalking me, and my lighter clicked five, six, seven, or maybe even eight times before the flame returned and allowed me to get my bearings. Each time you click to attempt to re-ignite it, there’s something like a hidden coin flip to determine if it comes back on. The lighter, for instance, is set up to go out after random periods of time. When I wasn’t frustrated by the excessive gloom, I could definitely see what the designers were trying to do. Using darkness to create tension can be great, but this is overdoing it. Your only renewable light source is one of those little gas station lighters which barely lets you see as far out as your own outstretched hand, and that led to a lot of me getting lost. A big one is that for some reason The Forest doesn’t have any gamma adjustment settings, and the dim default left many story-critical caves outright too dark to play through without darkening the room around me.
While honing my skills as a wilderness survivalist, spelunker, and axe warrior, I also felt like a little bit of an anthropologist – a novel and intriguing experience I’d never really come across in a game like this before.īelow the surface, things can get a bit more frustrating. It’s a fear above and beyond being chased by something that just wants to kill you as fast as possible. The feeling that I was sharing these woods with intelligent enemies with the capacity for rationality and complex decision-making sent actual shivers up my spine. The feeling that I was sharing these woods with intelligent enemies sent actual shivers up my spine.There are fascinating and observable differences in behavior between the different tribes, between individuals in the same tribe, and even contextual attitudes based on how much they have you outnumbered, what time of day it is, and how much you've changed the environment with the simple but functional base-building system. Sometimes they’ll charge you to test your mettle, but stop short if you don’t back down. Sometimes they’re content to follow you at a safe distance to figure out where your base is so they can report back to their friends. The Forest’s greatest triumph is the convincing self-preservation of the AI that governs their behavior. Unlike so many video game enemies, the cannibals aren’t suicidally aggressive, and that’s what makes them so unsettling.
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