The Forest is a first-person survival horror game, originally released in 2018 by Endnight Games after a lengthy stint in Early Access. Like most of its genre, the game has the player up against the odds, having to find food, water and shelter whilst surviving in a hostile wilderness. The Forest adds a narrative element, with the game requiring you to also track down your missing son and discover the secrets of the area the game takes place in, known as the Peninsula.
The game recalls, in a somewhat drier manner, the king of survival games, Subnautica. Like that game, it opens with a horrendous crash, leaving you alone in a hostile wilderness with zero idea of what to do. The game holds your hand even less than Subnautica's still fairly harsh opening, with your sole clues coming from a survival guide book, in which your character scribbles notes whilst also consulting it for information on how to build a fire, a log cabin, traps for animals etc.
The Forest can lure you into a false sense of security, by allowing you to build a formidable redoubt right next to your crash site early on, and you quickly fall into the loop of working out what you want to build per day and executing those tasks, whether it's resource-gathering, going hunting or fish, or exploring the landmass further. The landmass feels massive but is relatively compact, allowing you to traverse most of the map and back again in a single in-game day. However, The Forest is unusual in that its map is not static and will react to player activity. The Peninsula's tribal inhabitants are at first very wary of your presence and will not engage, but as you expand your operations, chop down trees, and start killing them, they will quickly mount a more hostile response. If they locate your base, they will start sending substantial forces against it, unless you vacate the area. In this way the game tries to allow you to build up a base of operations, but it also wants to encourage you to take a more active exploratory role on the map. Setting up multiple bases and moving between them, abandoning one area as the heat builds up only to return later, is a fine stratagem. There are also areas of the map much more remote from native activity, allowing you to build a more substantial fortress away from interference, at least for a while.
There are shades of Fallout 4 here, with the game throwing so much at you that it's easy to forget that you are on a quest to find your son (several achievements even riff on this, with the reward for building your first gazebo being a dry question, "Who's Timmy?"). The only clue the game can give you at the start is if you come close to a cave opening, with the game prompting you to explore them. Given that each cave tends to be crawling with...weird things, this can be a daunting process. Once you have worked out how to build some weapons (the bow is a lifesaver), don some makeshift armour and create light sources, the caves can gradually be tamed. The caves contain clues to your son's whereabouts and information on the other missing crewmembers, as well as starting to explain what the hell's been going on in this place to result in hordes of hungry cannibals and the creation of strange, barely-human creatures.
The Forest's narrative is light, lighter than even Subnautica's mostly-hands-off story and certainly much more than Grounded. The game's main goal here is atmosphere. The game builds an atmosphere of foreboding dread and horror, with brilliant visuals (these forests are among the best ever seen in a video game, even now) and absolutely fantastic sound effects: the whistling of the wind through the trees, the far-off cries of things in the woods which may or may not be aware of your proximity, waves crashing against rocks. The caves are foreboding, dark and disturbing, even more off-putting than the first time in Subnautica when you realise you have to drop really deep into the ocean to uncover the next clue on your road home.
Resource management is key, as in most survival games, and you have to proceed with caution as your character is quite squishy and fragile. You have to keep topped up with food and water, and finding a source of fresh water can be a headache all by itself. In a nice touch, you don't start with a map or compass, but can locate them later in the game. You fill in the map by physically travelling around locations, and gradually learn the lay of the land. This is a great touch, overcoming one weakness of those survival games which either give you a map straight up and make the game too easy, or don't give you a map at all, even when it's extremely illogical to do so.
The Forest is also a game that respects your time. All you really need to do is establish a small shelter with access to food (game is plentiful across the Peninsula) and water. You don't actually need to build a massive multi-level fortress surrounded by wooded walls which in turn are surrounded by rock walls with massive traps laid in front of them, with catapults located in your base to bombard attacking enemies. I never built a single zipline in my entire playthrough. The fact that the game allows you to do that is quite impressive. The game even allows you to play co-op with up to seven friends on PC (four players total on PlayStation), where the massive increase in manpower allows you to build some absolutely bonkers structures pretty quickly, although possibly at the expense of suspense and tension. An eight-man rumble squad with armour, bows and hatchets is going to tear through most enemies in the game very easily. Still, it's fun, and the game can also be played in VR.
If you take a single-minded, story-based approach, you can put The Forest away in well under 20 hours (though you may also end up wondering if the game should have been called The Caves, as you'll spend almost as much of your playthrough below ground as above), with the story also having multiple endings, though only one is canonical, and leads into the sequel, Sons of the Forest. If you decide to go mad building crazy stuff and ransacking the Peninsula for supplies, you can easily lose hundreds of hours on side-projects. The amount of freedom in the game is impressive.
On the negative side, although the environmental graphics are mostly excellent, creature and human character models are decidedly unimpressive. The game can definitely be obtuse at the start, and it can take a while to crack the proper gameplay loop of what you should be doing. Combat can be a bit janky, and though the AI of the enemy in how it patrols the Peninsula and hunts you down is excellent, enemy AI in direct combat situations is risible, with it being rather easy to get enemies stuck on geometry. Minor bugs can still be found, though given the game's openness and adaptability, some may have been unavoidable.
The Forest (****) is outstanding in its tone and atmosphere, the freedom for you to do what you want, and its light-touch horror storyline which still ends up being quite disturbing. This is a game which will stick you for a while, even if you don't spend that long in finishing it off. It's not perfect, but the jankiness resulting from its modest budget can add to the charm.
The Forest is available on PC and PlayStation 4 (and, via compatibility mode, PS5). A sequel, Sons of the Forest, was released last year.
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