If you've been following my streams lately you'd know that me and a few friends have been adventuring in The Forest, namely Fort Kickass, when i originally played the Forest back in the day I was completely unaware of just how deep and expansive the game actually is, so iv'e decided to revise my review of the game to include a lot of things that I left out and to explore more amazing areas of the game that I never got to experience, it's mainly for two reasons but it's understandable how I missed this(and others did) when the game is actually a lot deeper than it looks on the surface(no pun intended) and how much content there actually is in the game for you to do.
So first lets get the main stays out of the way and jump into revised review of the Forest.
The Forest begins with Eric Leblanc and his small son timmy on an airplane when the plane suddenly takes a nose dive and begins to crash, after a few hours Eric awakens in the wreckage of the plane, still groggy and confused from the crash he can see his son being kidnapped by a strange man covered in red paint, unable to stop him Eric looks on helplessly before passing out again, waking up again during the day Eric gets to his feet and scours the cabin of the plane for supplies before finally exiting the plane and taking an axe that has been used to kill a flight attendant, only just realizing that he is in the middle of a dense forest and he has no recollection of where the plane crashed.
With no survivors around and no way of seeing where he is Eric begins to create a shelter to survive in the dense forest but it isn't long before tribes of cannibals begin to stalk his every move before attacking him and trying to destroy what little shelter he has, fighting them off he begins to accrue a bunch of supplies and explores the island eventually discovering there is a massive underground network of tunnels and caves that a different type of cannibal lives in, exploring the caves he begins to unravel the mysteries of the island finding that he wasn't the first to crash on this island, he also finds supplies and the dead travellers from the plane that have been mutilated and strung up, he also finds older settlements of people ranging from different era's all the way back to the pirate era when he receives clues to find a flintlock pistol.
Eric begins to realize that the forest and it's network of caves have been host to several disasters and people, still trying to find his son it isn't until he stumbles across an underground laboratory in one of the caves that he realizes that The Forest is something else entirely, without spoiling too much of the story since it really is an impressive story that I wasn't expecting, the forest is something completely different to what you think for the majority of your time in it, there is also some interesting side stories with the cannibal tribes such as the clear skins and the blues who continually fight each other in a war which will end up with who you're attacked by the most, there's also some pretty interesting "side quests" to discover things about the Virginia, the bull and the Arm monster as well as the previous inhabitants of the forest.
Like the title of the article, there is a lot more to the forest than you initially think and even half way through it you think you know what's going on but it all changes once you start exploring the caves and tunnel networks.
But lets jump into the game play as this is what really impressed me the second time around.
The forest is an action horror survival but the difference here is that it really is survival in the truest sense, unlike most "survival" games the forest puts a massive emphasis on surviving throughout the entire thing, not just the start of the game in terms of getting set up or building a base, it's very easy to run out of food or supplies even 10's of hours into a play through so keeping on top of that is a must, mainly however you'll be setting up a shelter to get enough supplies to go exploring the island and the cave systems which are really pretty brutal once you get down there, i'll be talking more about the cave systems later but suffice it to say that it's like an entirely different game once you get down there.
When we first spawned into the forest we exited the plane and immediately found the coast line, unbeknownst to us though that this is the highest patrolled area of all of the forest around the crash site, the first few nights we hid in the water while we slowly began to build up, the vast majority of building in the forest is done with wooden logs, which also draws attention mind you, as we began to cut back the forest we began to start making a defensive line which would later be known as fort kickass, before we could get the walls up though we were besieged night and day by hordes of cannibal tribes which meant getting food was also hard and nearly every time I went into the forest to cut down trees i'd get chased out by 8 or 9 cannibals.
But this is what I mean by true survival, everything is a struggle to do in The Forest even from just setting up a basic campfire and shelter, we had so much fun fighting off cannibal tribes over a few pieces of wood, some sticks and rocks, i mainly built the shelter while my friend focused on getting food, armor and weapons together after about 8 days(game time) we finally had a defensive structure that allowed us to walk around freely without getting attacked constantly and also allowed me to setup a real shelter and accrue supplies, keeping in mind that i'd cut away a fair chunk of the forest at this point meaning we were easily spotted but also that cannibals wouldn't venture too close to our borders.
It wasn't until about 30 hours in on this play through we finally had enough gear to go searching in the caves, and let me just say I was completely oblivious to how impressive the cave and tunnel system is in the Forest, it's literally another game and it's easy to get lost or run out of supplies and die in the caves(aswell as the monsters and cannibals that roam around) but until we hit the caves i'd spent maybe about 30 hours in maybe.....5% of the entire map, which is crazy when you think about it I got so much play time out of the map and hadn't explored barely any of it so when i dived into the caves it was truly amazing.
The caves themselves are vast and dangerous, you need to get enough supplies to go down there first and have enough to survive down there, we took a bunch of bone armor and lighting equipment with us as it's pitch black down there, we first entered a random cave just to see what was down there and quickly discovered the place was huge, fighting our way down through the cannibals we eventually came across a mass of supplies that have been stored there as well as remnants of an old christian missionary group that had been slaughtered by the cannibals, eventually we came to a dead end with no way to go but down into the deep water where is where we found the rebreather for diving, at this point we'd been in the cave for about 40 minutes and I couldn't believe how much we had to explore, like I said, two different games.
Eventually we came to the end end of the cave we had explored as much as we could and now had new weapons and items, but this is where the hard part came in, we had traveled pretty far while underground and the cave entrance we exited at was no where near where we went in, we were now in an incredibly dense forest in the middle of the night completely surrounded by cannibals, luckily we found the torch down there to guide our way a little bit, but the thick shrubs and towering trees let the cannibals race all around us, as if this wasn't bad enough, it started to storm and reduced our visibility, if you haven't been out at night it's pretty spooky and we ran back to base fighting off cannibals along the way.
We returned and found our base had been invaded by the dead skin tribe, a group of cannibals who wear the faces of the plane crash victims, since we'd left our base undefended they had started to make a camp there, not only did we have 20 angry cannibals behind us, but our safe haven was now under attack by the strongest cannibals on the island, this is essentially what makes The Forest such an amazing survival game, it gets increasingly harder the stronger you get which doesn't leave a power vacuum like most survival PvE games, usually once you get upgraded equipment and armor the difficulty drops off, but in the Forest it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Right now we have a pretty big fort as well as armor, food and weapon resources and we're constantly pushing deeper into the forest as we clear, but it's becoming harder, the further we push out the more worried we get about our base getting destroyed while we're away and we've managed to piss off the tribes so much that i'm attacked nearly every time i leave the base to gather wood and sticks, judging from it's initial game play you would think the game is rather boring or cliche until you start to get deeper into it, it's then they you realize how much fun and how much time you can spend in this amazing game all the while constantly upgrading how you go about things, recently I just got the chainsaw and tree lopping has never been easier.
But The Forest really is an exploration game, the more you explore the more you change the game, but beware since the more you explore the more danger you put yourself in and it can undo all the work you've done when the heavily mutated monsters begin to show up (like Virginia) who can rip through your defenses and destroy your stock piles, I never got this deep in the game before but i'm glad I did this time as it's an awesome game, especially with your friends in surviving an increasingly hostile area with only a limited set of defenses and offenses(there's only one fire arm and it takes forever to load and you run out of bullets really quickly)
My previous review of the game left a fair bit out as I never really gave The Forest a full play through, as a reviewer it's pretty easy to pull the elements of a game out for a review in the first few hours, but in doing so you miss the fun experiences of the continued game, obviously I had no idea that the game had so much content and so many different mechanics so i'm glad I did keep playing it and i'm glad my friends joined me this time, starting out small then becoming big is always an awesome time in the sense of progression, we started out in a small hut on the ocean side hiding from cannibals to a massive fortress with reinforced walls actively hunting down cannibals(need their bones to make armor).
And the cave system really blew me away, I was expecting something kind of small or linear but the caves themselves could of been an entire game in terms of early access, we spent a few hours in each cave and the more intense ones like the Yakuza hideout or the Virginia's lair can take a couple of hours just to get to certain parts, also the upgrading of supplies is really interesting as well, at first you start out with a simple lighter, now we have a powerful torch to see in all directions, likewise the small plane axe that would take about a minute to chop down a tree was replaced by the chainsaw which takes a few seconds at best to fell a tree, I feel like that's not really expanded on or really showcased in Forest trailers or game play reviews as much as it should.
The story is pretty interesting as well, at first I thought it was just a one sided "find your kid" type adventure but as you explore you begin to learn more about the island and the creatures that inhabit it, one of the saddest stories in the Virginia, a small girl who was horribly mutated and now has the appearance of a spider and violently rages against outsiders, likewise the story of the laboratory and what it represents(and who) is also a massive story line that I feel gets undersold when talking about the game as it's pretty heartbreaking and terrifying all in the same sentence, I won't spoil it for you but suffice it to say the forest and it's inhabitants aren't what you think they are(and no it's not a Lost type deal) personally iv'e been really enjoying the story of looking for your son and uncovering the secrets.
Whatever the case, The Forest is a game that gets pretty under appreciated as it was released in Early Access when Survival Horror was all the rage, but unlike most of them actually gets so much right and gets more enjoyable the more you play it, Iv'e been having a lot of fun streaming it and playing with friends and also exploring the game island a lot more, setting up outposts and getting into wars with cannibals and venturing into the caves every now and then for supplies and upgrades, the release version of The Forest is also coming fairly soon and with it new mechanical changes and added items to make the game even bigger.
If you haven't tried the Forest, i'd say even in it's early access state(it's not even early access it's a full game) i'd suggest trying it if you're a fan of survival games like ARK, Rust or 7 days to die, the big difference is that the game is actually really hard and takes a bit of planning, it's also a great game to play with up to 8 friends, while there isn't really a PvP aspect to the game, it's still there if you want to, but by and large you'll be grouping together trying to survive the cannibals and exploring caves and the island to get enough resources to carve out a safe place for you and your friends, I don't usually suggest Early Access titles but the Forest is the rare exception to this as it really is an amazing game to enjoy.