The Forest is a base-building survival horror game by Endnight Games. It was released in 2018 after four years in early access on PC and PS4. I played it on PC through Steam alongside Lady Dynamo.
Gameplay
In being entirely honest, I found The Forest to be incredibly frustrating to play most of the time.
Sound
Volume throughout the game was incredibly inconsistent, and at times, disorientating. The game uses a lot of sounds to try to make it ‘scary’ but I found it just frustrated me more. I would be walking through the woods and hear a screech ‘behind me’. I turn to look, but there is nothing – it seems like the screeching sounds are played in a general area and are not directional, making it really unreliable.
In cave systems, while I expect to hear some ambient noise – it was at times absolutely deafening in comparison to the rest of the game. I was frequently having to adjust the volume just so I could hear Dynamo talking to me, while she was physically in the same room as me less than 5 feet away.
Character Design
After the game starts, you’ll find there are no customization options for your character; not even choosing to be female. That was just slight disappointment, though, as you can’t actually see your character. The Forest is entirely in first person, and I pretty much had no idea what I looked like.
Strangely, you can find multiple outfits through The Forest to wear, (including stealing the airline stewardess’s outfit from the plane!) but you don’t actually ever get to see how they look on you. There are no mirrors or options for viewing yourself, so Lady Dynamo and I had to continuously ask each other ‘how do I look?!’ and view each other’s screens instead.
After mentioning this to my partner; he did mention that the game was initially single player, and you couldn’t see the character so it didn’t really matter what you looked like. After adding multiplayer support, and finding that all characters looked the same – clothing was added to tell them all apart. In our case, it didn’t matter too much since with only two of us playing, we weren’t exactly getting ourselves confused – but I can see how that can factor in if you had more than one other person playing with you.
Difficulty and Scaling
While you are getting started in the Forest, you’ll have to be careful when exploring as there are cannibals out there. While some of them don’t necessarily outright attack you right away, a lot of them do – and they get more difficult as the game goes on. While we were playing, we found that when we started the game by creating a base to work from – we spent a lot of time building.
Although we weren’t exploring much yet; we started to realize that the time we were spending building was still time that the game was increasing in difficulty – and we started seeing more and more cannibals making it very difficult for us to leave our base at all. After about seven days in-game, the cannibals seem to uh, take on a very different… shape.
After getting frustrated, we ended up just starting a new game. During our second game, we nearly made the same mistake! It’s very hard not to spend time building up a base, especially given the way we traditionally approach base-builder type games. To try to make our time more pleasant, we ended up turning on developer mode and using some command lines. Yes, I absolutely cheated through a lot of this game because I was getting really frustrated very early on, but determined to see it through.
You can see a full list of the commands available for The Forest here. Once turning on developer mode, we ended up using:
- gametimescale – We found that the day/night cycle was incredibly short. Once it becomes night, it’s nearly impossible to see anything, and the time that your character sleeps seems to be related to whenever you log into the game – not … whatevertime of day it is. We weren’t able to sleep through the night, so after getting frustrated, we changed the time to .5 of the normal speed so that our days would be longer. During the night, we would speed it up to 2x the normal speed to get through it faster. If we were able to sleep at times that lined up with the cycle, then we just slept instead; but it was rare if that ever lined up.
- buildhackon – Okay, once I learned this was an option, I always ran it. It let us basically place the ghost of an item down, and then you could just build it even if you didn’t have the materials. Given that you can only carry 2 logs at a time, and we wanted to try exploring, we just went with it.
- buildallghosts – Similar to the above… this lets you complete all existing ghost items quickly. It’s a bit loud if you use it though, as it completes them all at once.
- killallenemies – At several points we became overwhelmed with the number of cannibals. I have no shame in admitting that I murdered them all with this more than once. (Note that this one didn’t seem to work on the final boss, though!)
- spawnitem / additem – Eventually, we just got really tired of everything and just spawned in items we kept running out of, like sap, feathers, etc. I tried to not do this much initially, but as time went on, we reached the point of ‘over it’ and just tried to finish the game.
- For some reason, this did not work with hairspray? I have no idea why, and couldn’t find any reason for it.
- addallstoryitems – At the end of the game, after finishing the boss, we came to a door that we didn’t ave a key for. It was late for us, and both Dynamo and I were just… ready to be done with the game. So, at this point, I used this command and it added in any items were missing so we could just wrap up the game.
- godmode – During the boss fight at the end, where Dynamo and I were both just ready for it to be over, I turned this on to deal with the boss. I couldn’t die once it was enabled, but even with it on, I still had a hard time fighting it! I never really seemed to get a good handle on combat in this game.
I did also initially try using ironforest to make all of our buildings indestructible, and after entering it – we found that it did not actually work. After some research, I found that it seems to have been disabled and replaced with a setting in the game instead.
Note that when developer mode was turned on, and I used several of the above commands, they only applied to my game. They only effects that carried over for Dynamo seemed to be the gametimescale command. Adding items to inventory, the build hack options, and god mode all seemed to be specific to me.
Crafting and Building
Crafting and building in The Forest were always very frustrating for both Dynamo and myself. For crafting, you will open a menu and see a tarp on the ground, and then you have to actually select the items you want to craft.
That in itself isn’t terrible; but you aren’t able to view any recipes unless you add items to craft with. You end up needing to just remember them a lot of the time, and they only indicated an icon of what you needed. If you didn’t already have the item, then you likely had no idea what the item actually was. And in some cases, items blocked other items – making them very difficult to grab or even see if you had one.
Giving items to anther player, was also irritating. You have no option to simply ‘drop’ something for them, you have to combine the item into a tray, and hold it out for them. Often, you would have to do this one item at a time, and some items couldn’t be given.
I have said this before, but games that do this really make me angry. All it needed was a tooltip to let you see what the item was called, and that would have alleviated that frustration. One of the recipes for an herbal mix required a couple of different flowers, but the icons were SO similar I had a very hard time figuring out which one I needed… then it ended up being that I hadn’t actually found the flower I needed for sometime. Being able to hover over and see a tooltip with the text of the item would have been incredibly helpful and make the game more accessible.
You do get to glue teeth and feathers to your axe though, and that… is fun. Also, the most fun was had when using hairspray as a torch.
The building menu was a bit more straightforward, although remembering where any item was actually located was obnoxious. I’d end up going through several pages trying to find an item. I really wish you could bookmark the more commonly used ones, or place two of the same item without having to reopen the book every time.
Menus
For story elements, the book contains a section about ‘notes’ – but I did not find them particularly helpful.
You weren’t able to zoom in on anything, and there were no other identifying items in the notes to remind you what something was. Some of the photos were incredibly hard to make out, or the text would be near impossible to read at times.
Finding anything in the book was frustrating for me. The icons at the top are pretty small and hard to see what they are, and in some sections there are multiple pages you may need to flip through to find what you needed.
Combat
I will admit, I am not the best at combat. I have never been good at melee fighting, and much prefer to use ranged weapons. When games are in first person, like The Forest, it’s even harder for me to handle melee because I do not have a good sense of how far away something is.
This causes me issues with things like using an axe, because I can’t gauge how far my swing will actually go. I prefer to use ranged weapons in this case, but in The Forest there is no reticle on the screen to determine where you are aiming.
It probably sounds silly to more experienced players, but it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize I had to aim a bow based on the little stick knob rather than down the shaft of the arrow. A reticle to indicate where I was aiming would have made that experience so much better!
Along with the difficulty of combat in first person, the armor system never really seemed to be clear. It seems like each piece of armor provides one ‘blip’ on the health bar, and you could have up to 10 pieces. (Unless you wanted to wear a warm suit, in which case, you had to remove all of your armor!)
It also seemed that no matter what piece of armor it was (lizard, bone, or creepy), it still only took one hit to remove it. If there were any numbers associated with how much damage was reduced, or how much damage was taken – it wasn’t shown on the screen anywhere so I never did quite figure that out.
There may be stats available in the notebook; but the notebook takes up the entire screen and the game doesn’t exactly pause while you flip through it, so I didn’t spend time in it if I didn’t have to. To be fair, I never even realized sanity was an actual ‘stat’ until nearly the end of the game, and I’m not sure it did anything.
Dying
Dying happens. I am not the best player at most games, and The Forest wasn’t exactly the easiest game for me, so I died a lot. While it’s always sad to die, The Forest made it a lot more frustrating that it needed to be.
As you are playing the game, you’re character is out looking for his lost son, Timmy. You gather materials, uncover the map as you go, gather weapons, build a base, fill out your notebook, etc. When you die, your backpack stays where you died, and you have to go and retrieve it. That’s not a big deal, and plenty of other games (such as Valheim) do the same thing. It can be painful if you are really far from the respawn point, but it happens.
I wasn’t shocked to see this same thing happen in The Forest. You die, and you have to go back and get your backpack to retrieve your items. I found a few things about this process to be unnecessarily obnoxious.
- When you die, you respawn at the plane crash with nothing. You can pick up an axe again in the plane to use as a weapon, however, you can actually only have one plane axe in your inventory. So when you get back to your backpack, and you want to collect your things and get back your upgraded axe – you can’t! It just seems to vanish. I also tried putting the plane axe into a weapon rack before picking up my backpack, but still no luck. I ended up stuck with the base plane axe and having to upgrade it again. Since I was using some command codes to cheat items into my inventory, this was… less terrible. If I had not been doing this, I would have been so much more irritated.
- As you go around the map, the paper map that your character finds starts to uncover. Also, not an uncommon mechanic, even if the map in The Forest is incredibly difficult to read and often, inaccurate in terms of your location and items shown on it. It seems to be an odd choice, however, given that you find the map on a dead body along with a compass.
- If you are picking up a map you found, why do you still need to uncover it? Is the game implying this dead person had not uncovered anything at all? If so, why a map at all? We could just draw on a paper as we went!
- When you die, your map gets wiped out! This was one of the things I found to be the most irritating throughout the game. Why would your map get wiped out when you die? If I can reclaim my backpack to get my items, why does my map have to reset? Why would it not contain the same information when I retrieve my gear?
- Uncovered animals or plants seem to be wiped from your notebook as well. I have no idea why you get to keep your notes (photos, magazine clippings, etc) but you lose the animals and plants you have identified? This confused me every time it would say ‘new animal discovered’ but it would just be a rabbit.
- When you come back, your a different character. Dynamo confirmed that my avatar was different each time this occurred. That impacted things in the notebook such as my sanity, which in turn determined if I could build effigys or not. That part didn’t bother me as much, but story-wise – if we’re coming back as a different character each time, how is Timmy still our child?! If we’re the same person, and Timmy is still our child, then WHY is our map wiped out?
Story
In The Forest, you’ll take control of … well, I’m honestly not entirely sure what the main character’s name is, but you’ll take control of him! You start on a plane with your son Timmy, and then the plane crashes. When you wake up, you are alone on the remains of the plane – with no Timmy in sight.
As you leave the plane and start exploring, you’ll find various animals for hunting and fishing, and materials that can be used for base-building. Most importantly, you’ll start finding weapons – because the island is inhabited by cannibals.
As you explore, the cannibals become more and more difficult – and more frequent. The further you go into the caves the more story elements you will find , and you’ll start to piece together how the cannibals came to inhabit the island.
Full story write up, but beware of spoilers!
As you keep looking for Timmy, you’ll find some items from other characters that hint at someone named ‘Megan Cross’ and eventually, you’ll find some video tapes and a camera to view them with. Through the tapes, you’ll start to see what looks like a company researching creatures on the island, and some footage of various mutated cannibals escaping. You’ll also find drawings of a strange artifact throughout The Forest, which you’ll later find out that it somehow has the ability to bring back the dead.
Megan’s father, Matthew Cross, appears to have been a researcher at one time – and towards the end of the game, you’ll actually find the facility where this occurred. Through one of the tapes, you’ll learn that Megan seems to have died in the facility due to some escaped mutants. At least, that’s what appeared to have happened in the tape.
Throughout the dead bodies and remains of mutants, you’ll eventually find more details to piece together what happened – including the saddest part, that Timmy is sadly, no longer with us. Although you are not able to save Timmy, the main character decides it is a good idea to hook him up to this machine, and off you go to find a sacrifice to try to revive him? I completely understand a parent’s grief, but this just sounds like…. a recipe for disaster.
Eventually, you’ll come across Megan. Who still looks to be alive, but then mutates into some… very strange creature for a very obnoxious boss battle. Afterwards, it apparently seems like a good idea to use Megan as the sacrifice to bring back Timmy and the main character tries to put her into the device. Unfortunately, since she is already dead, it isn’t going to work, and another sacrifice is required.
Where do you get another sacrifice? Guess what brought your plane down! After some more exploring, you’ll find that the facility also had a device set up to bring down planes whenever they passed overhead – and you now get to make a choice. Are you going to shoot down a plane and kill however many people to try to bring back Timmy; or do you shut down the machine and accept that Timmy is dead?
In our game, we decided that as sad as it is, Timmy is gone, and what happened to Megan was terrible. Rather than murder another plane full of people to start this cycle over again, we shut down the machine. There was one cut scene after in which a photo of Timmy is burned and ashes scattered to the wind, and we’re returned to the game to continue surviving on the island.
I’m not sure why we don’t just use the abandoned Yacht, or build a raft, or use any of the tools in the facility to call for outside help – but staying on the island forever seems like a good idea.
Overall Review
I’m giving it a 6 out of 10. I feel like the game had a lot of promise, and a lot of people really liked it. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive, despite my experience not being the best. As usual, I try to come into a game without doing much research on it beyond a trailer or two because I want to avoid spoilers, have very little hype, and just experience it.
Much of the game did match the trailer – you do build a base, find weapons, try to survive and deal with some creepy cannibal folks. The story was a bit on the weak side, and since I tend to favor games with strong story elements – not having one made it harder for me to invest in it.
I felt rushed, constantly – I wish the game would have let me play at my own speed, and advance after certain events occurred rather than a number of days. I admit to being slower than most at picking up skills in a new game, but I felt like I had no time to figure it out – I just had to hit the ground running. I am also not great at PC games, so while I used a controller – this slowed me down in a lot of ways due to having to page through everything.
Also, I managed to break the game by just… crawling out of a cave? That was … exciting.
Our full playthrough is available on YouTube, if you are interested, but I’m sure there is more time spent being angry at the game then actually playing it!
Was it fun, though?
Sometimes it was, but the most fun I had was when I was heavily cheating. I found traps to be the most glorious part of this game, and I absolutely loved watching cannibals light themselves on fire, get blown up, or get caught in a noose.
The menus were frustrating, and I had an extremely hard time dealing with dark environments and random volume changes. I understand that is meant to be part of the experience, and to make it scary; but I found it so frustrating to not be able to see anything at times. I felt that there was not really any fear outside of the occasional jump scares, but the potential was there for it!
By the end of the game, we were just so ready to be done with it, we barely cared about the ending. There is a sequel, and I’m not sure if I’ll play it or not yet; but if I do, I hope some of the things that annoyed us are better.
Either that, or it is just simply not the right game for me. That’s okay, I tried! Did any of you play it? What were your thoughts? Did you find it frustrating at times, or is that just me?
The Bardic Unicorn 