I have over 100 reviews on Steam, and only about 5 of them are negative. Why? Because I usually seek out games that I think I’ll enjoy, and then do my best to find something to like in them once I boot them up. Unfortunately, there was very little I liked about The Forest, and I wouldn’t sincerely be able to recommend it to almost anybody.
To be fully transparent and fair to the game, I played it in a group of 4 friends on a Discord call. The tension that we were supposed to feel in the opening moments- the ominous silence of the forest interrupted by the faint, cheerful tweeting of birds, and the quiet rustling of branches against the wind- was undercut by us laughing and smacking each other with rocks. But this is also largely the game’s own fault. We tried the in-game voice feature, but it was awful. The only way to talk to each other is through walkie-talkies, which distorted and muffled our voices to the point of distraction rather than immersion. There is also no proximity-based chat whatsoever, meaning you could be inches from your friend’s face and still need to pull out a walkie-talkie.
There were a few exciting moments throughout our playthrough. Our first encounter with a cannibal, and with each of the mutated variants, was genuinely intense. But these moments were completely carried by the novelty of it all, as the combat in this game is incredibly underbaked. There are a handful of melee options with slightly different range and damage. Other than that, there are a few throwables and a bow. It doesn’t take long to find out that basic enemies are easily stunned when hit by almost any weapon. Any normal one-on-one encounter is trivialized by just spam-clicking until the enemy finally stops flailing its arms around and goes down. (For context, we played on normal.)
Our first cave exploration was pretty exciting too. Splitting up to explore every corner of the pitch-black cave and hearing the rare echo of a cannibal cackle and howl for the first time was a great moment. However, there are way too many caves (probably almost half of our gameplay in a game called THE FOREST), and they quickly become tedious to explore. The ♥♥♥♥ lighting stops being interesting and starts being annoying when key progression items are hidden in a mountain of corpses with no environmental clues pointing to them. The “realism” defense doesn’t even work here- who the hell would go into a cave expecting to find keycards, chainsaws, climbing axes, and rebreathers? I’m not asking for yellow paint or anything, but the closest the game comes to guiding the player is a to-do list item that says “explore the wet cave” and a meaningless picture of a random tree with an X on it. You don’t even get a map unless you happen to explore the right cave. A blank map btw, as if it’s that hard to find a blank piece of paper in a sea of suitcases?
As for the other mechanics, our usual resident base-builder for survival games built a shack, placed some water collectors and a garden, and called it there, so I can’t imagine he found that system all that interesting. Survival systems are not a challenge in this game, but a recurring inconvenience, as birds are magnetically attracted to your character on the surface, and granola bars are plentiful in the caves. The crafting menus are cumbersome to interact with. Hunting is boring, made worse by stupid prey AI and random creature spawning/despawning right in front of your eyes. There is also little actual story to push you forward, beyond the simple but admittedly cool premise. They try to rectify this at the end with pure twist and shock factor, but this was not enough in my opinion. On top of all that, the game is buggy as hell, and needs to be manually saved if you don’t wanna lose hours of progress. And I’m talking “phasing through a wall and being forced to quit to menu without saving” levels of buggy.
If you’re a survival-craft fan looking for a new fix, there’s still a good chance you’ll like this game. Apparently I’m in the minority here anyway, and I’m not usually a fan of the genre (Though I did enjoy Subnautica and Grounded a lot). I can also see someone booting this up alone, and enjoying the tense opening hours. I really wanted to like this game, but I couldn’t. If I “played it wrong” somehow, I am genuinely curious as to what I missed. I’ll leave the comments open for that.
4/10
