Forest 404 Review

[Liora Putcha]

InFox in the Forest this is a good thing, because at the end of the round you get points depending on how many tricks you won. Winning a trick also lets you lead the next trick, forcing your opponent to play something else.

Perhaps too often Shut Up & Sit Down praises games that play like soldiers in the service of simulation or innovation. Games that come stomping into our review stack and make everything else look like toys. THIS is the next big thing! Pay attention to ME!

There was a micro-backlash two years ago when I reviewed Archaeology: The New Expedition (pictured above). A few people bought it only to discover, to their horror, that whether they won or finished last was down to luck. Like the titular excavator, these people dug their hands in the sand and came up with nothing of value. There was no control. No game. Or rather, the game in Archaeology is often little more than gambling.

You should buy The Fox in the Forest if you love the quiet moments in table gaming as much as the loud ones. You should buy it if you think you know why, for 500 years, humans have been inseparable from playing cards.

I've reviewed hundreds of games, and some have been a real pain in the ass, for sure. Some games are bad, and I have to play them anyway. Some games are middling, disappointing examples of a great concept and bad execution. Then there are games where I want so badly to stick around in them, to explore and collect everything, to find all their secrets, and I just can't, because I'm on a deadline.

Ori and the Blind Forest begins as a storm buffets the ancient, life-sustaining Spirit Tree, and a single, magical leaf is blown away to land in the forest below. The leaf, it turns out, is a cat-like creature named Ori. Ori is found and adopted by the kind Naru, who raises Ori as her own. The pair live a happy life until one night, when the Spirit Tree is corrupted, leaving the forest "blind" and dying. With everything he cares about at stake, Ori meets the spirit Sein and sets off to restore the Spirit Tree and save the forest.

First, there's real characterization and personality to Ori and the other inhabitants of the forest. Moon Studios takes enough time at the beginning of the game to invest you in the story and its leads before putting everything in danger, all without feeling too cutscene-driven. Ori treats its characters with care and respect, granting them motivations and personalities, all with almost no dialogue to speak of. There are villains in the forest, but there's no clear evil, not really.

The second reason should be apparent with even the most cursory of glances: Ori and the Blind Forest is strikingly beautiful. There's a quirky, distinctive art style to the characters themselves, and they are painstakingly animated to express the character their absence of much spoken dialogue at all can't provide. Ori also artfully manipulates the emotional impact of these moments with a sweeping orchestral score.

Ironically, as impressive as the character animation and soundtrack are, I was more struck by the world around them. Ori and the Blind Forest uses traditional sidescroller visual cues like parallax scrolling in ways I've never seen before, layering hundreds of instances of animations everywhere in the game world. The result is a space that feels alive. Everything always feels in flux, in motion, ready to shift at a moment's notice. I'm sure there's static artwork in Ori somewhere, but I can't remember any of it.

Ori's traditionalist streak isn't limited to its visual concepts. Ori and the Blind Forest's skeleton is deeply rooted in the item-gated action-adventure genre that reached a sort of platonic ideal with Super Metroid in 1994, and in that respect it isn't unique. Other genres have borrowed Metroid's name and smashed it into other games to try to make something new, but I've never played a game so determined to take and develop those ideas and augment them with incredibly refined, responsive mechanics the way Ori does. Moon Studios has prioritized this mechanical foundation, resulting in incredibly tight, responsive controls that make Ori a joy to play.

Per its influences, there's plenty of exploration in Ori and the Blind Forest. You're free to go more or less wherever you want from the start, impeded not by invisible walls but by Ori's physical limitations. When you encounter a barrier you can't traverse, or see a spot you just can't reach, it's because you haven't found the skill you need to make it happen yet. As the game progresses, Ori finds new abilities that should be familiar to genre vets, like wall jumps, the ability to float and more.

But Ori and the Blind Forest isn't content to use its abilities as one-off keys to new areas, or even rote tools to be employed the same way over and over. Instead, it practically demands you use the new parts of Ori's arsenal on a regular basis almost as soon as you find them, in scenarios ranging from simple enemy encounters to elaborate platforming challenges that will kill you for too many mistakes.

I don't want to mislead you: This is trial-and-error design. You will die, a lot in all likelihood, until you learn the minimum necessary to overcome the challenge Ori is putting in front of you.

Here's the thing, though. Performing well in Ori feels amazing, because it isn't easy. Ori isn't on rails, and it's not full of quicktime sequences. It's about timing and reflexes, and quickly sizing up as much of a situation as you can and acting accordingly. Even the basic gameplay loop of platforming and defeating common enemies involves moment-to-moment decisions about how best to use your skills beyond "shoot the thing."

This difficulty is further leveraged by making quicksaves a resource. Ori can use his limited pool of energy to create save points around the Blind Forest, and over time he can earn more and more energy to save more often. But that same energy pool can be used offensively for charged attacks that come in handy against more resilient enemies.

This save system is a smart, small tweak on established convention that typifies so much of what the game does well. But I think Ori is just as well-served by its brevity. At just over seven and a half hours, I sat at around 90 percent completion in the game. And when it ended, I could still remember the characters, who they were, what they were doing and what I was doing.

Moon Studios seems freed by the lower price point of a downloadable game to make something that isn't artificially extended. There's lots to explore, but not so much that I lost track of the plot or my motivation, which, for this kind of game, has always been a particular challenge.

Ori and the Blind Forest is a rare realization of fantastic design and production values in a space where I wasn't expecting to find it, displaying a spectacular level of confidence in what it is and what it does. And here's where we come back to wishing I hadn't reviewed it as quickly as I had to. It's a game that provides so much to explore and appreciate, and I would have liked to have taken just a little more time than I was able.

The impenetrability and the strangeness of the deep woods, their existence as a place outside of civilisation, a place where the borders between the human world and a world of inhuman powers grow fuzzy, is an old, old trope in literature and folklore. The forest is the abode of bandits and of monsters: It is outside civilised laws, and the law of might prevails.

Veris Thorn lives in a village near the woods. The south woods are tame. The north woods are not: Inside them is another wood, not a natural wood but a place of strangeness and terror from which few have ever returned. The north woods eat children. Veris is the only one in living memory to have entered the woods and retrieved a lost child. The child died later, but she did bring the child out first.

This is not horror, not quite. Or perhaps it avoids being what I see as horror only by the presence of hope that is never quite denied, and successes that, while partial, are never more painful than complete failure. The heart of the story is Veris, her complications, and her privacy about her griefs, the complex tension between her desire to help the children and her reluctance to trade away more of herself than she must. Some griefs are too terrible to bear, much less share.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

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I've loved The Forest when I've played it in the past. I first took a look in 2014, finding it limited but a lot of fun. I then went back in 2015 to discover it was hugely improved and far more involved. I even videoed half an hour of my inept ambling. I have been back since then, but not written any more, but it's probably close to two years since I really dug into it. Now it's out in a final version, I'm surprised how little has changed in the last three years, but also pleased to find the same mix of survivor and terror. Not quite so pleased to discover so many of the classic bugs are still there.

The opening sequence is now really fantastic. The core idea - opening on an aeroplane, some kid sat next to you, before suddenly everything starts shaking and you realise you're crashing - that was always good. But it's been made hugely more detailed since, and it's been made far more clear that the kid sat next to you is yours, not only because he's holding your arm at the start, but more importantly by the way you protect him, holding him into his seat when things start getting bad. (Although not enough to put his seat belt on...) You later wake up on the aeroplane aisle to see a mostly naked man lifting your child up in his arms and walking off the plane. Black out again, and now you're on your own. There's an axe, there's some food, and there's a forest to start surviving in.

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