Squelch. Crackle. Crunch. Cackle. I can't think of four words that better describe my time with The Forest so far. Crawling its dark caverns and fighting its crazed cannibals has been exhilarating and exhausting, and despite being 10 hours into this Lord of the Flies meets Resident Evil by way of Outlast and DayZ affair, I'm certain I've barely scratched the surface. Generally speaking, I can take or leave survival games, but The Forest effortlessly weaves old fashioned horror – jumpscares, unpredictable enemies, nefarious corporations, unseen and awful-sounding terrors that lurk in the dark – around its survival mechanics; a move that keeps both elements intrinsically tied, while somehow also making them feel like separate, independent things. Combine this with the game's open-ended structure with a narrative focus, and you have something that straddles the horror, survival, and survival horror genres simultaneously. It's very clever.
Now, anyone who's played The Forest over the last eight years already knows this. You might have first jumped in when Endnight Games' multifaceted scare-n-craft 'em up debuted on Steam's Early Access initiative way back in 2014 on PC. You may have first descended on the game's setting, The Peninsula, when it launched in full on PS4 four years later. Or, like me, you might be taking your first tentative steps into The Forest in the final stretch of 2022, all the while thinking to yourself: Bloody hell, this game is absolutely brilliant. How on Earth did I manage to sleep on it for so long?
