The Forest (Video Game) – TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheForest

Remember to kick back, relax, and enjoy your flight.

— The Red Man

A JEALOUS GOD PUNISHES A PARENT’S FAULT ON THEIR CHILDREN

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On your way back from a trip to New York, your plane crashes in an uncharted wilderness. Your son, Timmy, is taken by a mysterious man covered in red paint. Your fellow passengers are gone, and as the possibly sole survivor of the wreck, it’s now your job to survive on your own and find your son, by any means necessary. But the local cannibal tribes won’t make it easy on you, and they’re not the only horrors out for your blood…

Developed by the four-person team at Endnight Games, The Forest was first announced back in May 2013, and opened to Early Access on Steam a year later. As of April 2018, it has reached full release. Gameplay is a mixture of the Survival Sandbox and Survival Horror genres, with the challenge being to juggle resource gathering and protection from the local cannibal population.

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Beginning in late May, the game also received a patch to give it Virtual Reality support. The VR version of the game, naturally, features updated controls for the motion controllers, such as being able to more freely aim your bow, throw weapons, point lights, and chop trees. The VR version is still in beta, however it is being updated and patched regularly.

A PS4 port was announced in December 2014. It was finally released on November 6th, 2018.

A sequel, Sons Of The Forest, opened to Early Access on Steam on February 23rd, 2023.

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Examples you’ll encounter in The Forest:

• Take Your Time: You may have crash-landed in a mysterious forest and had your son spirited away right in front of you, but nothing will actually happen to him until the endgame. You can spend months establishing yourself as the apex predator of the peninsula and forgetting yourself as a father. In fact, there are two Achievements/Trophies that offer subtle Continue Your Mission, Dammit! digs: one for spending 100 days without finding your kid called “Bad Father”, and one for building a gazebo called “You should be looking for Timmy”.
• Ten-Second Flashlight: The plastic torch is a flashlight with a very short battery life.
• Terror Hero: You can be one of the intimidating variety if you so choose. It’s actually possible to simply scare off most mutant groups appearing during daytime (assuming they aren’t instantly hostile) by simply holding your ground and not breaking eye contact. This can backfire if you scare them badly enough to call for backup.

  If you wear Red Paint, which the cannibals are mentally conditioned to fear, all but the strongest ones will back off or even kneel and cower in fear. Mutants, though, are unaffected due to lacking eyes.

• Through the Eyes of Madness: When the player character’s sanity is below 90%, flipping through the survival book reveals a page spread covered in bloody smears, describing how to build gruesome effigies out of severed body parts. When the player character’s sanity rises back above the threshold again, the page is nowhere to be seen.
• Throwing the Distraction: Throwing rocks and tennis balls can distract nearby cannibals if they haven’t spotted you yet.
• Trailers Always Spoil:

  Both of the special mutants

  are shown in a trailer.

• Tree Top Town: An option for player bases. There are special platforms that can be built around tree trunks, which can in turn have other things built on top of them. Ropes can hang down from them, and they can be connected to each other by hanging bridges. They make reasonably defensible areas against the natives.

  Though some of the creepy mutants can knock over trees…