The Forest V0.52b – Endnight Games

Introduction

This article will be about the game The Forest by Endnight Games 2014 from my point of view and experience. Before you start reading this article and you intend of playing it, please do in case of any spoilers, although I have not finished the game yet.

I first started playing the game on my own after I heard from my friends that it had an amazing game play. Keeping in mind that this game is still in its Alpha stage, I remember watching my brother playing this game a couple of years ago, and it was not that impressive, especially the Ai, so at that time I put it aside and forgot about it.

After hearing of the progress, I gave it a try myself and I tell you that I spent a lot of hours on my first run exploring, crafting and defending my character.

Experience

The game starts with you travelling on a plane with a kid. Something happens to the plane and it crashes in a forest on an island. While you are still dazed you see a human figure standing in front of you picking up the kid and talking him away.

After gaining your senses you start playing, you immediately learn that your character need to be feed to be kept alive so you start gathering food and supplies including a small axe from the airhostess chest.

After familiarizing yourself with the controls, inventory and a journal where you can: see stats, find information about flora and fauna and find recipes for medicines, weapons, traps and structures. You encounter again these creatures which seems to be indigenous cannibals which you have to continuously defend yourself from.

You start building a shelter, farm, cages, traps, weapons and upgrading your equipment to make your life on the island easier. After settling I started exploring the island and found several caves which you can explore.

At this point, there was no longer the need to continue playing by myself since personally I prefer sharing experiences with others in an explorational game. So, my friend hosted a server and we were back synced on the same island. We rapidly built a small camp and during the night massacred a lot of those poor cannibals where we made a full bone armour each with more bone remaining and put up even some effigies made of their body parts and sticks to decorate the place and maybe keep them away.

We then decided to explore a nearby cave from where we found a hole in the ground with an abseiling rope attached as an entrance. Confident that we can own everything the game throws at us armed with an upgraded spear and a bow with some arrows, we ventured down the hole. As we were sliding down the rope it got darker and darker as the sun light could not reach the floor of the cave.

As we reached the floor I immediately lit up a torch and exactly in front of where we landed, was this strange creature that looked like it was several female bodies attached together but in one smooth mesh, no stiches no seems. This thing immediately started to attack us and my friend climb up the rope, while myself could not reach it and escaped deeper into the cave with very low health. Luckily, I manage to kill a couple of cannibals and made it out from another entrance in one piece back to the camp.

This wasn’t over, again we crafted full armour a hand full of Molotov’s and some flares to light our path in the darkest moments. This time we approached the creature from the entrance I came out to have a vantage point. This time we slathered the beast and his younglings and continued to explore the cave. We found a lot of valuable items including a secret chamber full of dynamites and a red paint which made the cannibals to go on their knees and do not attack you when encountered.

We had a lot of other adventures where one time we found two dead divers which we took their rig and dived into the waters of the underground cave. On emerging we found a huge iron door that we opened by putting items on a pressure plate and inside we found a camp site with a huge black cross painted on the wall, a lot of Bible books scattered around and about four to five skeletons crawling to the cross still in their pose as they were killed. It seems that they were killed by something really powerful and quick since they died in motion. Apart from that we didn’t find anything interesting in that cave.

In another cave, we found a Katana which change the gameplay completely. It became relatively easy to kill the cannibals since the speed of the weapon is amazing. After finding the Katana we decided to set up a base near a huge crater that we are intending to find a way to explore in the future. While building the base, we were attacked several times even during the morning from the combined huge female creature but we found a bug/ weakness that by shooting just 2 flaming arrows it will die. Some creatures where really interesting as they rammed us and they broke down even trees while trying to kill us.

At the current state, we just finished the base and are ready again to start the exploration, maybe we manage to get down the crater.

Analysis

Please do not judge the game from my comments since as I already mentioned it is in the Alpha stage and will be improved for sure since they patch the game every month religiously. Said that these are pros and cons about the current game on 8th January 2017.

Let’s start talking about staff I don’t like so we finish on a good note. The game is full of attractors, every object that you can pick up has a shining layer. Now in this game you can pick up stones, sticks and several other items but that is already enough to make the whole ground shining especially when you are deep in a forest under the trees. It has its benefits since you do not struggle in trying to guess which objects you can pick or not but on the other hand it’s a type of hypermediacy since it has realistic graphics and makes you detach from incorporation in the game.

The exploration side of the game is just amazing, you continuously find secrets and intriguing scenes like the iron door I mentioned above, but once you are in there is no more to explore or a puzzle to solve to get to a more interesting part and find a bigger secret.

Although the game genre is not classified as MMORPG I think that it still falls under the specification when played in multiplayer. Bartle’s (2012) definition of MMORPG is the design of a virtual world which has self-contained physics, real time, shared world, that you are a player who is controlling an avatar and that is not reality which The Forest when played in multiplayer hits all the requirements. Therefore, I believe that it is safe to us Bartle’s taxonomy on player types.

Thus, cave and island exploration is attracting the explorer player type. Bartle (2012) says that it is very important to reward each player type appropriately. In our example when we found the iron door, we as explorers, were rewarded with achiever’s rewards. We found several items but what we really wanted is further and more interesting exploration after that the scene put our hopes high that we were on something huge. In reality nothing happened and the cave just lead us out of the bottom of a lake which was very disappointing.

The game also gives you the ability to build traps, we have not explored yet their full potential and I do not know if you should try and hide them deep in the forest but the traps we build around the base are basically useless since the cannibals notice them and walk around; occasionally cannibals trigger a trap.

The world in general feels complete and everything works in harmony as from animals to vegetation and trees. The graphics are realistic and amazing and surprisingly enough it really runs smooth even on a 7-year-old machine like mine with medium graphics. The overall sounds are very convincing: from footsteps, to animal noises, foliage and tree barks falling. Not to forget the occasional wind sound bursts which interacts with the environment around you in synchronisation whit the sound.

The cannibal’s animation and sounds are just right. Occasionally you can hear cannibals calling for others in the middle of the night with a crow like voice which leaves a huge impact on you and lest you think that no good is coming from that scream. When cannibals approach you, they keep their distance until others come or they feel comfortable to attack you. Even when you fight them you may injure severely which will leave the cannibal suffering on the ground, if you do not finish him he will get some strength back and escape or restart attacking you.

Corpse attract other cannibals which come to investigate and will usually try and revenge them if they encounter you, so the best way is to dispose of them. The game mechanics of the AI is cleverly done and you enjoy this level of realism.

We are playing version 0.52b, I do not have experience of the previous versions but even if the game is not finished it gives the player an overall great gameplay for survival, crafting but not that much of exploration till now.

Other Players Experiences

Michael Summers (2016)

Reading the review of Summers he also got engaged for several hours playing the game. Although he does not specify the version the fact that he wrote the article in mid-2016 indicates that it is quite a recent one.

He also describes how he is impressed by the stunning visuals and sounds, but he makes an emphasis on how he enjoys the crafting system where it lets you put a blueprint of an object you want to build in the world and then gather resources needed and put them in the blueprint. On gathering all the resources the object will be available for use.

Summers also includes how dedicated the Endnight Games team is in keeping posted the community about upcoming updates and delivering strong and meaningful updates to the game on time scheduled.

John Walker (2015)

Walker is not keen about the story of the game and he says that there is actually no story to speak of for the time being but he loves the new customisable building options. Apparently, Walker played the game in earlier versions and he speaks a lot about the improvements done to the cannibals, graphics, animals and buildings.

He spent a lot of the time exploring new things to build from tree houses to shelves where he put his medicine on and a gazebo which he deforested a whole area to build.

He talks about a persisting bug in the game where luggage’s from the crashed plane continuously spawn giving the player an unlimited supply of medicine and snack bars but he doesn’t complain since he finds it comfortable.

A thing that I forgot to mention in my review but Walker has nailed it exactly right is tree cutting. He describes it like this, “it remains the best tree cutting game in all of history… there’s such a real sense of your swing deciding the position of the cut, and the trunk chips away very satisfyingly”. The only thing taking him out of his immersion of tree cutting is that when the tree hits the ground it turns out into pieces of logs, which yet he finds useful.

He ends his post by saying that this is how early access is done correctly and that the overall game experience is rather a special one.

Conclusion

I think that overall player, including my friends I have been playing with can agree that the gameplay experience is rather engaging even in its Alpha stages from graphics, animation, dynamics, Ai and exploration potential. We look forward in future updates where hopefully will make exploration more exiting and more challenging in solving the mystery behind The Forest.

References

Bartle, R., 2012. Player Type Theory: Uses and Abuses | Richard BARTLE. [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIzLbE-93nc [Accessed 9 December 2016].

Endnight Games, 2017. The Forest. [Online] Available at: http://survivetheforest.com/ [Accessed 7 January 2017].

Summers, M., 2016. The Forest Review | KeenGamer. [Online] Available at: http://www.keengamer.com/article/13291_the-forest-review [Accessed 7 January 2017].

Walker, J., 2015. The Deforestry Commission: A Return To The Forest. [Online] Available at: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/09/23/the-forest-review-early-access/#more-316415 [Accessed 7 January 2017].