Cannibals in the Trees

In my last post I mentioned a number of games that I've been slowly working through, and in this post, we're going to be talking abooouuuuut...

The Forest is an early access alpha game. And the thing is, there is not much else in this world that I hate more than early access games. They're running rampant these days on the game marketplace, namely Steam, and the most notorious is probably DayZ. DayZ might not be the first of these games, but its immense popularity definitely skyrocketed them into the mainstream. If you're not entirely familiar, early access is when developers charge less than the price of a full game for a, well, not full game. When you give these "devs" money, you're essentially investing in a hope that the game is one day completed. Very often it never is, and aside from exorbitantly priced DLC packages becoming more and more prevalent (cough EA cough), early access games are probably my least favorite gaming industry trend.

Another extremely popular trend on the marketplace right now is sandbox survival games like DayZ, Rust, and ARK: Survival Evolved. (Which coincidentally, are all early-access games). These are games where you generally have a food/drink meter, can engage other players in combat, and are overall just fighting to survive.

The Forest is fairly unique when compared to these other survival games in the sense that it is actually a horror game as well. While in DayZ you do fight zombies, the main threat is other players and the zombies aren't exactly a facet of horror. The Forest takes the genre of horror game, which is usually linear and atmospheric, and puts it in the open world survival template of the aforementioned games.

What you end up with is interesting, for sure. Because of the fact that the game is an early access alpha, there are a myriad of bugs that can be very jarring at times. Clipping is frequent, some physics are wonky, and even with a nice gaming PC you'll be sure to have your share of framerate stutters.
The survival part of the game has you chopping wood, collecting rocks, hunting deer/rabbits, crafting, and more. The horror aspect has you on edge while doing all of these. You'll know what I mean in a little bit, I hope.

So, the game starts you off on a dimly lit plane, sitting quietly with a small child holding onto your arm. Suddenly things go wrong and you can tell the plane is descending, and before you know it, you just survived a plane crash. When you wake up, you see a naked tribesman pick up your child and walk away, but you're too weak to do anything and you fall unconscious again. When you wake up for real this time, you find some food, meds, and an axe. The plane is utterly destroyed and every passenger on the site is dead.

I'm gonna share some screenshots now of my most recent play session, which took place a little after I built my first camp and survived one night.

I chopped down basically every tree around my campsite for lumber, but also for vision purposes. I built it so the back was against a boulder, since I didn't want to be surrounded. You can't see it from the shot, but right behind my player is a small lake, another reason for my camp placement. 

Here you can see what the inventory screen looks like, which to my knowledge, doesn't pause the game. I actually like it and find it fairly unique, although it's pretty nerve-wracking to have to open this up during combat to switch weapons. I do find it funny that if you want to take out one stick, your character flattens a tarp and arranges every single item he owns first...

If you didn't have any knowledge on this game, you may have been confused about what's actually so scary about it, since I didn't go into great detail. Out of the corner of your eye, you catch shit like this. That's a zombie/feral/voodoo lady that I caught just staring at me and making gargling noises. After my initial jump, I chased her down and eventually killed her with my axe. Note: this is much easier and less scary to do during the daytime, since nighttime is DARK. After I killed her, I realized I had followed her to the beach, so I walked along it for a little while and found this:

Upon getting closer to this structure, it was apparently some lookout post thing, since I was able to climb up it. Don't know who built it, but on top there were some meds and food. I got pretty nervous when I saw this though:

That's just three zombie dudes chilling. Definitely surprised me a bit, but like I said, at daytime they are a bit more manageable. I eventually climbed down and killed two of them, and by the time I did that the third was gone. It was also getting really dark. This game doesn't give you much time for the sunset, so it was almost pitch-black before I could even get back to my camp. And like I said before, it gets REALLY dark. I could hear the warbles and screams of the voodoo people while I sprinted through the almost impossibly dark forest, and could feel some anxiety building. I ran headfirst into one of the natives, nearly shit myself, and then kept running. By the time I got to my camp I was able to make a fire, save, and then use the sleep function on my little cabin. Fortunately, they don't make you wait out the entire night.

Well, uh, I hope you enjoyed reading my semi-review and also semi-story / playthrough thing. As always, I'll have more to come with lots more games, since it's just about all I do!

-SK