The Forest game Review: Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
The Forest: When survival can be toldIt was thought to be lost in its own forest, but after four years of early access development, The Forest, produced by the Canadians of Endnight Games, is finally coming out. Among the first announced and then competed on all sides, one could have feared for him a fatal fate. However, with more than three million players despite an alpha steeped in bugs, and a development of which we could not see the end, the work always pays and here we are in the presence of a title that will mark its genre.
Let's crash in the woods ...
The Forest begins, like any self-respecting survival game, with a disaster. Here, we obviously think of Lost since you are on a plane with your offspring, when the device suddenly drops. Father and son seem to be the only ones still alive, but, while your character crawls towards his child, the latter is kidnapped by a man with a very unfriendly expression. Then begins survival. We get an emergency ax from a poor stewardess whose clothes we can take. With a few medicines, sodas and dishes in the bag, we venture out of the carcass of the device. Once outside, the title makes us understand that we will have to manage on our own and that support will be non-existent. Neither one nor two, we start the meticulous search of all the suitcases scattered around us and we collect branches and leaves on the fly to make a first campfire as well as a shelter to spend the first night. Goals ? None, except to find the child, the others will appear as you wander in the forest.The latter is also a real pleasure to travel. If some funny artifacts and collision bugs are present, the visual atmosphere is neat, the sound design is a real pleasure, when the almost total absence of hub or menus displayed on the screen reinforces the immersion. When we know that the developers of the title, three in number, come from the cinema, we understand better this desire to transmit experience through the image and on this point, The Forest is unassailable. Exit quest markers, menus with eighteen panes or explanatory pop-ups. Here, everything is gathered in a small notebook indicating what the player should know. We find the essentials of the craft dedicated to survival, the listing of the animals and plants encountered, the objectives or the various clues leading to the discovery of other passengers, living or dead. For the inventory, Endnight opted for a sheet, spread out on the ground and gathering everything you can pick up. No pause when browsing this book and this inventory, which brings immersion further solidified by this multitude of small choices which, put end to end, allow us to offer an experience from which we only come out when leave the game.
GOING TO LOG TO SUCCEED
Quickly during the game, we understand that deforestation will come our salvation. Because if the first night is spent in an agonizing calm in the almost total absence of music, serious things start very, very quickly. When we have barely finished our first shelter and enough to catch and store rabbits, a native appears in the distance. Obviously, we are careful and we do not venture into the woods as soon as we get off the plane, so the meeting surprises, especially since there was nothing to predict its presence. If you approach it, it will run away and come back with a friend to continue watching you, without an ounce of aggressiveness. As you can already imagine, it will not last. The more you risk exploring, the more you build by cutting down trees and animals, the less the funny tribe that populates the island will be nice. In fact, they weren't from the start, they just assessed the threat you pose. Because when discovering the island, we regularly come across their camps, filled with human bodies, often dismembered, drying up or filled with tennis balls.Back at our camp, we then hurry to fortify the whole, to craft traps and solid protections in order to fight against these cannibals, more and more threatening as the progression progresses. The craft, at the heart of the title, can be divided into two parts. The first is that found in the newspaper, and which brings together the fundamentals, namely fires, shelters, storage and the main defenses that will have to be manufactured to survive. The second is to be found on the inventory side, and is based on experimentation. You then have to grope around to discover new, more nutritious weapons, objects and dishes. And there, we touch on two elements making The Forest an excellent survival game: tension and staging.
The title of Endnight manages to keep the player under pressure at all times, making each outing, each day and each night an adventure in itself, thanks to a multitude of details such as the need to clean the blood of which one is covered, the unexpected noises and the permanent threat. Unfortunately, the concern generated by the presence of more and more cannibals, especially at night, is reduced by an AI and a pathfinding which do not pay homage to the title. Thus, we regularly see one of them bumping into the trees, running in any direction while we are three meters away. Fortunately, the number makes up for it and there will always be one to squeeze you out.
THE REAL DANGER IS HIDDEN IN THE DEEP
During walks, you can fairly regularly spot the entrance to caves that you can go to, these latter being provided with pretty climbing ropes that you just have to grab to discover a whole other world. Because the immense surface forest actually hides a labyrinthine network of caves, obviously inhabited, and in which is hidden the intrigue and the scenario of the title, which pointed the tip of its nose by small touches until then. And the change is violent to say the least. Instead of beautiful wooded and luminous expanses, we discover sticky spaces, composed of sounds of runoff, body parts and grunts impossible to locate. And to make matters worse, even with a brightness adjusted to the hair, the developers wanted us to see nothing, including with the lighter serving as a light source. Cinephiles will find an agonizing atmosphere at will, almost claustrophobic, obviously referring to the film The Descent by Neil Marshall.Undoubtedly, these improvised speleology phases are the greatest success of the title, while being the most devious. Because the caves are obviously populated by cannibals who take refuge there, but also absolutely abominable and deadly mutants. If the bestiary is reduced, it is perfectly controlled and corresponds to the created universe. The challenge then comes mainly from the nature of the terrain, which allows only few options for leaks. After several trips that have resulted in death or an unexpected outing, we return prepared, with what to drink, eat, light up and defend ourselves. If we manage to get past these difficulties, we discover more sophisticated equipment, and clues to what is really going on on this island. Despite everything, a good preparation will not be enough to make the exploration easy, the title being perfectly calibrated to manage the difficulty and keep a permanent tension even with meticulous players. It will take several hours to be searched from top to bottom, and it will remain important to go back up in order to defend your camp from attacks.
WHEN SURVIVAL IS TALKED ALONE OR WITH SEVERAL
In the end, it is when The Forest signals to the player that he has a story to tell and that he departs from survival, as many titles know how to do, that he places himself above the lot, like a terrestrial and underground Subnautica. Indeed, the latter relies on this survivalist tension and an unhealthy atmosphere carefully distilled to reveal its intrigue, hidden in the corridors of the caves. We then understand the will to largely abandon procedural generation on the part of the studio, which wanted to keep hold of the balance of the narration, and which does it more than well. From there, it is important to advise players to discover the title alone at first, without opening a wiki unless necessary, in order to keep the spirit of discovery, the constant tension, and the fear of going down into this new cave that can be seen around a cannibal camp.However, the game is wonderfully well balanced, the multiplayer fully maintains its rank by relying on other springs. The tension of the descents and the scenario are less important, but we take a real pleasure to collaborate in order to build a real fortress and trap the hordes of natives who will not stop trying to destroy the work. So, after a trying and solid solo experience, it is a whole different title that we discover, yet designed with the same tools and rules. Unfortunately, the multi still suffers from technical problems causing disconnection or loss of backup taking several days back.
The notes
+ Positive points
A perfect balance between survival, exploration and storytelling
Very worked visual atmosphere
Solo and multi, two different experiences
Immersion thought down to the smallest detail
The scenario unfolds naturally
The underground
-Negative points
A very dated AI
Technical problems in multi
While early access is populated by mediocre survival games with dubious interest and physics, The Forest manages to place itself above the fray thanks to a science of detail, tension and staging at all times, provided you start alone with the helmet on your ears. We think we have discovered a well-crafted survival game, we come out of it having lived an adventure very well balanced, which pays the luxury of having something to tell. The title is not afraid of mistreating a player who is too or too cautious, without frustrating, the possibility of going in another direction is always offered. If the AI would have deserved to be at the level of the rest and that different technical shortcomings dot the multiplayer, we can only advise this survival game which will have overcome its problems to become a reference.
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