Tricks of light in the forest

This is a lovely, meditative game where you play as a kid who goes off on an adventure through the forest nearby their house -- though you go a bit farther out than your parents would like and you encounter some danger along the way. The main focus of the game is your exploration of the forest, including taking photographs of the landscape and collecting samples of plants, bits of debris, and odd artifacts. But as you explore, the narration that accompanies your observations reveals the contours of a bigger, intriguing story: (Spoiler - click to show)some kind of world-altering period in the recent past, some combination of climate change and political instability, that has impacted civilization for good.

Pseudavid develops this larger story in a brilliant, subtle way. We are not playing through that story; we learn about it second hand, refracted through the player character's natural descriptions of what they're encountering on their walk. These observations are written quite well -- beautiful bits of prose poetry describing a discarded snack bag or moss growing on a log. The player character also does not have full knowledge of this history either, as major events largely transpired in their parents' generation. This is the world that they know and have grown up in, though they have some stilted awareness of the world before.

There are some light puzzles, but these serve more to put up guardrails on your exploration and ensure that you hit spots you might not have otherwise. (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, you never would have needed to cross the river if the boar didn't knock over the water tower; and you never need to find the cabin, if the monitor lizards don't block the bridge across the river. For the most part, I found the Gruescript interface to work very well with the exploration/observation mechanics of the game, but it becomes a bit clunky when trying to solve the puzzles.

I could see this game as one in a series, where we learn more about this near-future world through the eyes of other characters. But if this is just a standalone, then it works really well as a kind of sci-fi game: a seemingly normal walk in the woods during which we learn about how very different our world could be.