The Forest (2014)

The Forest is a triumph, both for the survival genre as well as gruesome horror. It gives players just the right amount of freedom to enjoy the challenge of this hellish nightmare.

The Forest frequently flirts with perfection. A fantastic and engrossing survival-horror experience from start to finish.

Jank and sometimes dumb mutant cannibals aside, what Endnight Games accomplished with The Forest with only a team of four people is simply extraordinary. It's one of the best survival games I've played in recent memory.

It’s a brilliant game that blends survival and horror into one terrifying, tense experience. The story it weaves is well-written, the gameplay — particularly the progression — is perfectly refined, and there are few games as hilariously engaging in their co-op.

For most of them, survival games shipped as « early access » are mediocre, at best. But The Forest isn’t one of them: it’s a deep, finely tuned game which is never afraid to brutalise the player.

It’s a harrowing survival ordeal that knows how to play with tension and create the sense of a real world with complex inner workings and mysteries I was eager to discover.

Successful mixture of horror, exploration survival, but lacks endgame ideas for long-term motivation.

In a crowded landscape littered with a few too many survival crafting games, The Forest makes a pretty strong case for itself. With an open-ended world balanced by a story that moves forward, The Forest contains both freedom and mounting tension and provides not just the means for the player to survive, but a compelling reason to do so.

There's a lot to think about when it comes to surviving in The Forest, but the balance between each of its interlocking parts keeps the game moving at a riveting pace.

If you were already tired of fighting horrendous mutants, the alternative ending is the only valid reason to return to the forest. If, on the contrary, you have lived under a rock until now and you missed it, we warmly invite you to pack and board ... but watch out for the turmoil!

The Forest knows how to mix the mechanics of crafting and survival. Endnight has managed to stay afloat, polishing graphics and errors, as well as adding a few surprises to the first players.

The Forest is one of the best survival games to date, especially because of its interesting story, inspired by horror movies like The Descent. Everything is here to remind you that the surrounding nature will do everything to destroy your morale and your life. Oppressive, stressful, but so exhilarating, The Forest is made for any survival games' fans, even if it suffers from weird physics and perfectible AI.

The Forest is a great survival game, particularly recommended for those who enjoy crafting and would like to discover a story as they survive.

With every second of gameplay as agonizingly riveting as the next, The Forest is a stellar study in horror, survival, and anticipation. When in its element, The Forest is as worthy as any title costing three times its purchase price. When not, the low production budget peeks perniciously through the cracks of this otherwise superbly thrilling indie.