izigame.me

There are some games you wish you could forget, so you can experience them all over again. I wish I could forget about The Forest and the 20 hours I put into it, because they felt like the equivalent of cleaning a dirty bathroom floor with a toothbrush.
To be fair I feel I have to first mention the things this game does right: The atmosphere is amazing for 90% of the time and the exact kind of creepy you are looking for when you buy a game like this. Running through the trees at night with barely any visibility while being chased by cannibals and creatures hollering blood curdling screeches after you, or seeing them stalk you from a distance before running at you with surprising and terrifying speed- it WILL put you on the edge of your seat. The diegetic inventory system that is laid out in front of you in 3d is also a nice touch (although it makes it difficult to find specific items if you have a full inventory) and i appreciated the variety of animals you can hunt and whose heads can serve as decoration for your walls. The story feels a bit generic (you crash land on an island and have to gather clues from other survivors to find out what happened on the island for it to be overrun by cannibals), but it gives you just little enough information to keep you guessing and interested in the conclusion.
Which leads me right into the bad stuff, because I would have really liked to experience the ending of the game... except it couldn't: I reached the final area of the game and tried to enter the cave that would have led to the ending, but when I tried to enter the game simply went unresponsive.The keyboard prompt was on screen, I pressed E, nothing would happen. I tried restarting the game, changing keyboard binds, loading a different save, no luck.
spoiler alert
Apart from game breaking bugs that have yet to be fixed after 6 years, there is just so many small bugs, design oversights and bad decisions that the game is riddled with:
-You can only hand other players certain items one at a time (e.g. bones). This is very tedious to do several times and it's unclear to me if this was a design decision or simply a bug, because putting more than one item in the can worked for other items.
-Water doesn't render correctly at the bottom of the sinkhole in the morning. Everything will be pitch black but the water will appear like it's bright daylight, giving it a strange milky white appearance.
-Dried meat and raw meat look almost identical on the drying rack. If it's too dark to see (which is very often) it's impossible to tell them apart. If you pick it up, the game very unhelpfully tells you that you picked up "meat", so you have go into your inventory and hover over it to check if it's finished drying
-If you follow the beach on the top left of the map you will find a mountain wall with exposed back faces that allow you to look all the way into the mountain. This area is not out of bounds and easily accessible.
-Animals are randomly bloody even though you didn't shoot them.
-When grilling meat, the game will prioritize your already dried meat over the raw meat in the fireplace interface, which makes it very easy to accidentally cook it. Cooking dried meat is instant and serves no purpose other than turning a long shelf life consumable in your inventory into one that is now bound to the fireplace, essentially wasting it and leaving you with the fresh meat that will now spoil in your inventory. The icons for dried and fresh meat are also identical and have no descriptors, so even if you are careful not to put in the first thing that pops up, there is no way to be sure, unless you go into your inventory, put the specific one you want to cook into your hand and interact with the fireplace again, making the quick select menu completely redundant.
-Walking anywhere is a chore, because your stamina regenerates linearly rather than exponentially. This turns your trips into a 50/50 of progressing at decent speed and crawling at snails pace waiting for your stamina to regenerate.
-When crafting, you arbitrarily have to remove the crafting product from the crafting area before being able to create a new one, instead of having it moved to your inventory automatically. This is especially annoying wile batch crafting consumables like arrows or armour and having to do a bunch of back and forth between left clicking the craft button on the right side and right clicking the item in the middle of the screen to put it away.
-Structures created by one player may not be visible to another player.
-Softlocking is abundant: One of the most egregious areas for this is the helicopter in the sinkhole which has a conveniently player sized open window you can easily fall into. You could even say it looks like you're -supposed- to go inside to possibly discover new items or lore, but you're not, you'll just be stuck. In my opinion softlocking is excusable in random mountain structures, but this is a clear point of interest in the map and just signals extremely lazy game design and playtesting.
-Spawning for the raccoon seems to be bugged. After regularly tracking through areas where they were supposed to spawn and even looking up spawnpoints and specifically searching for one for half an hour i have yet to see a raccoon in my 20 hours of play, which made it impossible to craft the warm suit.
-Some essential items (such as the climbing axe and employee id tag) blend into the cave environment and are very easy to miss if you're not looking for them, forcing you to go through the entire cave again after googling how to climb up the walls with the yellow rope.
-When respawning on the plane you can be surrounded by cannibals and repeatedly killed because you run out of stamina before being able to escape. Spawn killing is annoying in CoD, in a single player game it's infuriating.
-When on the boat, water consistently and very prominently clips through the ground.
-Even with cave brightness turned all the way up, it's impossible to see more than a meter in front of you. Regardless if this was done for realism or the scary factor -and even though there are consumable flares- the player should have the option to influence the brightness meaningfully if they perceive the persistent blindness to be more frustrating than scary, which was my experience.

This was just some of the annoyances i regularly had in this game, i'm sure there are more i haven't encountered yet. Judging by the review score I seem to be in the minority with this, or maybe other players aren't as easily bothered by design like this. Maybe you will not see most of these things as a problem in which case i heartily recommend this game to suffer through with a friend or three (when it's on sale), but as it stands right now I had a mostly frustrating experience with the Forest and I would not recommend you waste your time on it. I will watch the ending on youtube instead of touching it again anytime soon.