2 Feb 2014

The Forest: This Year's Most Anticipated Survival Horror


So I was thinking about making a new section called Under the Radar, because you know, I like things organized and categorized. But for now I'll just hold up to that idea for a while until I make at least 10 solid posts for this section.

Anyway, thanks to college, I'm a little behind now. Well, not just a little, as a matter of fact, quite far behind. But at least I'm not so far behind because the Forest has not been released yet. I've been intrigued by this game since I heard about it last November. So, today we'll be talking a bit about The Forest: my most anticipated horror games of 2014 (so far, I think).


Simply titled as "The Forest", the game is a survival horror in which your main objective is simply to survive in an open-world forest. Hence, the forest. Think of something along the lines of State of Amnesia: Not Cartoony Don't Starve. The game will be powered, or supported by the Oculus-Rift, whatever that means. Maybe it's some new-gen platform or something. Whoa, I'm really so far behind. I'll get to that.

If The Forest was human, then it would probably be a shy one. There's not much to find in the internet about it. We have insufficient exposure of the game. There are some promotional screenshots, a few trailers and that's about it. My guess is that they're trying to use the element of surprise to promote the game. It works on me. I'm in.


Here are a few things that I managed to gather about the game. We'll be playing as a plane crash survivor, who is stranded in a forest and has to survive as long as he can...or until something happens, I guess. We're going to have to build shelters, plant crops and vegetation, and hunt or fish for meat. I expect there's going to be some kind of resource management since we need woods to build shelters as well as rocks and twigs for fire.

Well, it's not that bad, I don't mind staying in the forest forever if that's all I have to do, one might say. Wrong. I don't think the objective is simply to just survive, I think it's to survive until you're out of the forest (whether rescued or on your own) and back to civilization. It won't be just about staying in the forest as long as you can. Trust me, you wouldn't want to stay forever.


Because there are cannibals out there hunting you down.

That's right. We won't be alone. We're going to share the forest with multiple tribes of people (I don't think there would be just one group of enemies) who share the same appetite for human flesh. But they're not just a bunch of crazy, leaping cannibals. They are organized, they have social ranks and a belief system.

In addition to men-eating men, there will be mutants as well. Errr, okay, maybe I heard it wrong.. Maybe there's no mutant, but just the cannibals, except they're mutated. OK, for now, let's just assume that there are going to be mutated cannibals.


The Forest is said to encourage the player's creativity to travel, solve problems and combat enemies. Talking about combat enemies, you can choose between the usual direct approach or the stealthy one. The enemy AI has been programmed to be smart enough to use tactics such as flanking on you. Well, it's like not these things are new these days anyway, but I thought I'd just mention them because I felt like it.

But the most intriguing thing about this game is its atmosphere. I expect The Forest to be a hybrid of Amnesia and State of Decay, but with a twist. I hope it won't borrow too heavily from movies such as The Wrong Turn. Anyway, I think I'd be travelling a lot in The Forest , because my eyes would beg to explore the beauty of the nature of the game. Seriously, have you watched the trailers? The game is gorgeous and hauntingly beautiful. Since the trailers are made with in-game graphics instead of CGI, I hope the main game will look just like them.


So far, nothing "horror" that Hollywood or the West have offered me have shown me "real horror". Paranormal Activity? the Conjuring? Pfft... Left 4 Dead? Dead Space? Oh come on. I'm not being cocky, I just think those titles have been seriously mis-labelled. Even Amnesia failed to give me enough scares. Regardless, it did considerably well compared to most "survival horrors" out there.

Personally, I'm hoping that The Forest would be the one. I don't know about you but I'm hooked. Hopefully, the basic survival knowledge I have gathered while watching Bear Gryll's "Man vs Wild" would be sufficient to help me survive the harsh environment of the Forest.  And I certainly hope I would be able to drink piss as well, should I run out of water.

Because maybe I'd be too nervous to leave my shelter to get to a nearby stream.

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