The Forest (and Beyond)
Let's see, what did I say already about The Forest? Decent, but not outstanding, survival and building gameplay with horror aspects. Poor breadcrumb direction/story delivery. The story endgame gets very linear once you head through a cave at the bottom of a giant sinkhole/crater.
I actually got into it before I planned to - I was trying to build stairs down, which was taking a very long time, but a misstep led to falling down. Hugging the edges, I managed to survive and creep down from ledge to ledge safely. Thankfully, I had collected the required items beforehand (climbing axe, rebreather, keycard) or I would have had to find my way back up rather than being able to just commit.
This path feeds you some more information about what has been going on with the island. It's still only bits, but enough to piece things together. It leads to the missing son, a boss fight (which is extremely hard to kill compared to anything else in the game), and a choice that determines the ending.
Though, honestly, only one of the two ending paths IS an ending. It has some cliffhanger elements, but the other ending doesn't even end - you just return out to the island have access to a means of turning the cannibals on the island passive or more aggressive, they game itself doesn't actually end on that path.
Overall, I guess the experience was okay. It's not great or really memorable, but it's fine for what it is. My main problems with the game actually dovetail into other discussions...
I noted before that Subnautica did a much better job of mixing breadcrumbs and exploration to lead a player deeper into a story. That definitely stands. Another big compare/contrast point that comes to mind would be the Souls games. See, one of the big features of The Forest is the cannibals on the island. They're supposed to be a bit hard to read so the player isn't sure whether it's better to attack them or avoid them. But that opacity, in my opinion, proves detrimental to the game.
The Souls games, for all their vaunted difficulty, are very good at teaching the player. Enemies may seem daunting and unpredictable at first, but you can learn how they behave to the point most actually become very easy to deal with. And it does that without ever telling you.
The Forest, however, conveys nothing like that. I got that the cannibals had certain routes they frequented, yes. However, I never would have picked up on the way they are drawn to investigate a fire (sheltered or not) without reading that out of game. There are scattered red paint cans on the island that the player can use to paint themselves red which... I guess is supposed to make cannibals leave you alone, but only some of them? I could not perceive any difference, in the game, of behavior whether I was passive or aggressive to them at any point in time.
So, I guess that unpredictability could be argued as a good thing by "keeping the game fresh," but from my perspective it felt like nothing actually mattered. Avoiding the enemies for the first 7-10 days in game did not allow me to bypass them in the tight confines of the caves where critical (not that the game really tells you this) items are found, so is there any point?
Another big, if tangential, issue for a game that doesn't convey enough within itself is this ongoing Early Access Syndrome.
There really was a time when games were "done" when released. It's a bit hard to remember now, but before online everything, you'd buy a disk or cartridge and that's that - developers had no way to patch and change games if they wanted. These days, we're lucky if there's a day one patch for a game that fixes problems. More and more we have games that, by the time they are "released," people have been playing literally for years. Over that time, the game has grown and changed. Players have built up wikis of information which may or may not be up to date. Overall, it's a mess.
This stands out so much in The Forest, because I had to turn to non-game sources to try to understand some things. While trying not to unduly spoil myself, I also found myself sorting through things that may not exist. I watched a video about weapon modifications that showed customization options that don't seem to be in the game anymore. I saw mention of ways to build bases resistant to attack that only worked before a patch changed destructibility of certain things. While looking for a video of the ending I didn't get, I actually found two or three different versions of that ending.
It's common in other games, too. Stellaris is pretty well known for undergoing serious balance overhauls with major patches that render old guides and advice obsolete. You sort of have to expect that out of MMOs, but it feels to me like increasingly an industry-wide probably that affects all game types.
And this is one reason I tend to avoid early access games or beta releases. I want to play a completed game rather than having to relearn one over and over. I have enough trouble reconciling information from different versions of a game without diving headlong into it, thanks.
I actually got into it before I planned to - I was trying to build stairs down, which was taking a very long time, but a misstep led to falling down. Hugging the edges, I managed to survive and creep down from ledge to ledge safely. Thankfully, I had collected the required items beforehand (climbing axe, rebreather, keycard) or I would have had to find my way back up rather than being able to just commit.
This path feeds you some more information about what has been going on with the island. It's still only bits, but enough to piece things together. It leads to the missing son, a boss fight (which is extremely hard to kill compared to anything else in the game), and a choice that determines the ending.
Though, honestly, only one of the two ending paths IS an ending. It has some cliffhanger elements, but the other ending doesn't even end - you just return out to the island have access to a means of turning the cannibals on the island passive or more aggressive, they game itself doesn't actually end on that path.
Overall, I guess the experience was okay. It's not great or really memorable, but it's fine for what it is. My main problems with the game actually dovetail into other discussions...
I noted before that Subnautica did a much better job of mixing breadcrumbs and exploration to lead a player deeper into a story. That definitely stands. Another big compare/contrast point that comes to mind would be the Souls games. See, one of the big features of The Forest is the cannibals on the island. They're supposed to be a bit hard to read so the player isn't sure whether it's better to attack them or avoid them. But that opacity, in my opinion, proves detrimental to the game.
The Souls games, for all their vaunted difficulty, are very good at teaching the player. Enemies may seem daunting and unpredictable at first, but you can learn how they behave to the point most actually become very easy to deal with. And it does that without ever telling you.
The Forest, however, conveys nothing like that. I got that the cannibals had certain routes they frequented, yes. However, I never would have picked up on the way they are drawn to investigate a fire (sheltered or not) without reading that out of game. There are scattered red paint cans on the island that the player can use to paint themselves red which... I guess is supposed to make cannibals leave you alone, but only some of them? I could not perceive any difference, in the game, of behavior whether I was passive or aggressive to them at any point in time.
So, I guess that unpredictability could be argued as a good thing by "keeping the game fresh," but from my perspective it felt like nothing actually mattered. Avoiding the enemies for the first 7-10 days in game did not allow me to bypass them in the tight confines of the caves where critical (not that the game really tells you this) items are found, so is there any point?
Another big, if tangential, issue for a game that doesn't convey enough within itself is this ongoing Early Access Syndrome.
There really was a time when games were "done" when released. It's a bit hard to remember now, but before online everything, you'd buy a disk or cartridge and that's that - developers had no way to patch and change games if they wanted. These days, we're lucky if there's a day one patch for a game that fixes problems. More and more we have games that, by the time they are "released," people have been playing literally for years. Over that time, the game has grown and changed. Players have built up wikis of information which may or may not be up to date. Overall, it's a mess.
This stands out so much in The Forest, because I had to turn to non-game sources to try to understand some things. While trying not to unduly spoil myself, I also found myself sorting through things that may not exist. I watched a video about weapon modifications that showed customization options that don't seem to be in the game anymore. I saw mention of ways to build bases resistant to attack that only worked before a patch changed destructibility of certain things. While looking for a video of the ending I didn't get, I actually found two or three different versions of that ending.
It's common in other games, too. Stellaris is pretty well known for undergoing serious balance overhauls with major patches that render old guides and advice obsolete. You sort of have to expect that out of MMOs, but it feels to me like increasingly an industry-wide probably that affects all game types.
And this is one reason I tend to avoid early access games or beta releases. I want to play a completed game rather than having to relearn one over and over. I have enough trouble reconciling information from different versions of a game without diving headlong into it, thanks.
Comments
Post a Comment