Today it’s about a game that I didn’t actually stream – you could still watch though. In this article we talk about how I wanted to go on vacation with Luzi, DeeDee and Rafi and how things didn’t quite go as planned – it’s about The Forest.

Note: The images have been edited to replace the camera image of the person playing. That’s why those in the corners sometimes look a bit strange. Don’t be surprised!

As you may have noticed, I’m not often involved in multiplayer projects. The organization is usually too time-consuming for me and unfortunately it can happen from time to time that someone leaves the project or has to leave because of other commitments. However, when the idea came up that Luzi, DeeDee, Rafi and I would work on such a project together, I couldn’t say no – it just promised to be great.

With the upcoming release of Sons of the Forest this would have been an obvious choice – although three of us hadn’t even played the first part, The Forest. So why not bridge the waiting time until the release and take a look at what’s in store for us? It was quickly agreed and we met (with an unforeseen regularity) on Tuesday evenings to hike together in the woods.

We played the game on the Playstation 4, so I’m rating this version. Whether it’s much better or worse on PC I can’t say. The console version was definitely adventurous!

But what exactly is this adventure about? I won’t spoil anything, so just this much: the story begins with a plane crash. The host is the “main player”, the others are… there too. It’s difficult to explain, so more on that later. We wake up briefly after the crash and see that our son, who was on the plane with us, is being kidnapped by natives. Later we wake up again and the game starts.

The principle is then quite clear. We have a diary that contains all sorts of information: blueprints for first simple, later more complex structures for our island life, collected documents and pictures, and at the beginning one goal: find your son.

Of course, this is also the end goal at the same time, when exploring the island you then come across the intermediate goals: we find structures and caves that we have to investigate, new blueprints and crafting recipes, we discover to new areas – nothing special, quite proven and something we had a lot of fun with, especially in the group. The game has some fun elements and ideas for passing the time, and quite interesting approaches to base building.

So as we are happily exploring the island and building our base, we are of course not alone: everywhere we come across strange, more or less humanoid beings who are not at all happy with our presence. Ranging from bone- and loincloth-clad “humans” to giant, multi-legged meatballs that simply run headfirst into crowds to cause damage. The background of these beings will also be clarified later, but I will withhold this from you here.

These are all classic elements of such a co-op game, and in principle there is nothing wrong with them. If I had to sum up the game in a few words, I’d still say this though: it’s incredibly bad.

Anyone who has known me even for a bit knows that I can find something to get mad about everywhere. Nevertheless, I would recommend many games because I know that certain things just bother me disproportionately that others don’t even notice. The Forest is definitely an exception here.

You can start with the incredibly poor technical implementation. The game is riddled with bugs. There is practically no element that works 100% correctly – things disappear from inventory, structures are unusable, textures disappear, elements take ages to be reloaded, monsters cannot be attacked, monsters do not attack, entrances do not work, some Players hear noises in the dead of night, the others have a quiet, bright day at the same time – the list can go on and on, it’s just cruel. The game has to be given credit for the fact that we made it to the end without too many crashes – but that’s not much of a consolation. And some of us still had to restart the game several times because certain things weren’t working – everyone can decide for themselves to what extent that counts as a “crash”.

Another point is the translation of the game. And this one makes me think the developers just didn’t care at least to some extent. Even basic menu items are mistranslated (you don’t “save” the game, you “rescue” it). Some are simply not translated at all, others contain spelling mistakes or maybe no text at all – in detail this can happen to any game, but in this case it was just an impudence.

However, if it was so bad technically, surely all the effort went into the story, right? (something I would call the “Bethesda-way of game development”). And I have to say – meh. If I had played it alone, I probably would have stopped after the first stream. There’s a lot of running across an island that doesn’t have a lot to explore (oddly enough, you also spend the least amount of time in the forest). You find some clues and objects and fight a lot with sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker zombies (for the sake of simplicity, call the monsters that). All in all, except for the last stream, we mainly built bases and searched and hunted for food – quite fun in a group, but not directly challenging in terms of gameplay.

It struck me personally how lost we would have been without Luzi. She’d played the game herself years ago and still had a vague idea of how to advance the story. Without her we would still be running in circles looking for clues.

The story itself then mainly took place in the last stream – very compressed, certainly with interesting approaches, but with many, many, many inconsistencies. As a result, the first streams hardly felt like progress (storywise speaking). An important reason why I would have given up as a single player long ago.

A technically… strange aspect of the multiplayer was also noticed here. There were specific points where story-relevant actions could be taken. If this was collecting an object, each player could do this individually – a picture or document was then just there for everyone until you picked it up.

Certain other actions that could only be performed once (e.g. opening a door) could be performed by any player – this sometimes made more sense, sometimes less. Especially when it came to emotional triggers, we all seemed to be the father at times. I wouldn’t necessarily call that bad, but it was.. weird. Here I almost wished that only the host could perform some actions. Interestingly, there were no classic cutscenes, but direct actions in the game. As a result, everyone saw the same thing from their respective perspective. This had both advantages and disadvantages, but these would lead too far at this point.

So, what is my conclusion? I had a lot of fun – although the game itself had practically no part in it. It was very fun to explore with my three buddies and run wildly around when we were attacked again and hurt ourselves more than the opponents (also because the “No PvP” option, contrary to expectations, does not disable PvP).

For the next time, however, I wish for a game that even remotely lives up to the expectations. Not only does The Forest get no endorsement from me, but I strongly advise not to waste your money on it – especially since with the recent release of the sequel it doesn’t look like any effort is being put into it (or like the studio has learned anything from this for the next part).

At this point I want to emphasize once again that the multiplayer action was definitely fun and I’m really looking forward for the next time. I think our group fits together very well and we were able to switch between deep conversations and wild screaming and kept a suitable balance. I hope we’ll find a new game soon to go on virtual adventures (and hit and poke each other with sticks) late into the night.

What do you think about the game? Do you agree with me, did you have the same experiences or maybe a completely different one? Have you played the sequel, Sons of the Forest, or are you planning to? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!

A recommendation that I can definitely give are my three charming teammates: