Through the Forest with the Beast

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

10 word summary: “Your community doesn’t like you for superficial reasons, run away!”

This is a simple, short game. You give your character a name and favorite color(?) which are dutifully repeated back to you later in the text but don’t seem to serve any narrative purpose. This kind of thing is often used to nudge the player to invest in the protagonist, but does it work? Maybe in the early days of IF, but nowadays with the customization available in video games the bar is much higher than two traits, one of which is any random string of characters. Beyond our input, the only additional character fact we are given is the reason for their self-imposed exile so notwithstanding customization, the protagonist ends up being a bit of a blank slate.

The game has a pleasant presentation - a moody forest scene with an appropriate wildlife sonic backdrop. That kind of worked, but the author set a challenge for themself by using artwork dark on the left and light on the right. Meaning the choice of overlaid text color has to be read across the entire screen. The right side of the screen was notably harder to read than the left. They also included a health/status box that unfortunately was too small for the information it wanted to hold! Text often disappeared beneath box boundaries making its utility questionable.

There were writing issues throughout the piece. Descriptions that only kind of worked like “trees bend to create a path of sunshine” Consecutive sentences that start with the word ‘however.’ Descriptions that were insufficient to understand the stakes like “room covered in glass” which from context we later realize should have been “room covered in glass shards.” Those are notably different mental images! There are even descriptions that don’t parse without way too much work like “Luckily the metal was sharp to an entrance punched into this strange metal wreckage.” Proof reader feedback could have addressed a lot of this.

Gameplay was fairly limited, and flouted convention in a key way that made it harder. It was a linear affair first playthrough, the only options were to press forward and every now and then go back. You had health and stamina stats, but were never presented with an option to manage them so just for tension then? However, linearity is not uncommon in IF, but that choice really puts all the Engagement burden on the text and narrative. However here between the writing, the narrow goal (and background) which was crying for but never received explication, and the extreme brevity there wasn’t much opportunity to elevate the forest/site exploration quest. (See, you thought I was being too nitpicky. Dual use of ‘however’ is offputting, right?)

Then there was a wild design choice. After the first runthrough, I was like “I didn’t get to make any choices, dafug?” So next runthrough, I took the only alternate choices the game made available, to go BACK in certain spots. In most IF, if you start in Room A and go north, the assumption is south from Room B gets you back to A. “Ho, ho! Not so fast!” saysTtFwtB. Going back unlocks new paths - not only does it take you in a new direction, there is actually no way to retrace your steps! Thematically doesn’t seem to have any justification (unless its saying ‘you can’t go home again’ just saying it super super low key) and a weird choice when “Left and Right” were still available. When you go back, a few other paths open up to you, and those are marginally less linear. They are some consequential choices that aren’t completely arbitrary, but not super well laid out either. Only one path seemed to offer one choice to manage your health/stamina. And two of them felt kind of samey: find cabin, interact with female head of household.

It was light and quick, but didn’t provide enough meat to really chew into. It’s a reasonable framework to layer a deeper narrative and more fleshed out gameplay onto. Never breached beyond Mechanical for me, unless Head Scratching over Design Choices counts.


Played: 11/7/22
Playtime: 15min, 2 survived, 1 died
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless