I’ve been dumped in the middle of a foreboding, eerily quiet wilderness – like you typically are in open-world first-person survival games. As I make my way to the nearest coast, I’m startled out of my foraging by a bestial grunt and prepare to defend myself. But the hunched and disheveled creature pursuing me stops several yards short of tearing my face off… and waits to see what I do. This was the moment I realize The Forest is going to spend the next 30ish hours cleverly and terrifyingly subverting my expectations.

The wooded, alpine peninsula that becomes your home is almost idyllic in its quiet splendor, made up of delightfully verdant woodlands and sparkling ponds. But it’s also inhabited by several tribes of feral, macabre cannibals who mark their territory with grotesque effigies of human skin and bone from their victims. From the moment I first came across one, the peaceful, easy feeling turned into a constant paranoia. Everything was always just a bit too quiet, and even twigs snapping from my own footsteps or a rabbit darting out of a bush could make me jump.

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“ The feeling that I was sharing these woods with intelligent enemies sent actual shivers up my spine.

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Unlike so many video game enemies, the cannibals aren’t suicidally aggressive, and that’s what makes them so unsettling. The Forest’s greatest triumph is the convincing self-preservation of the AI that governs their behavior. Sometimes they run away. Sometimes they’re content to follow you at a safe distance to figure out where your base is so they can report back to their friends. Sometimes they’ll charge you to test your mettle, but stop short if you don’t back down.Below the surface, things can get a bit more frustrating. A big one is that for some reason The Forest doesn’t have any gamma adjustment settings, and the dim default left many story-critical caves outright too dark to play through without darkening the room around me. Your only renewable light source is one of those little gas station lighters which barely lets you see as far out as your own outstretched hand, and that led to a lot of me getting lost. Using darkness to create tension can be great, but this is overdoing it.

When I wasn’t frustrated by the excessive gloom, I could definitely see what the designers were trying to do. The lighter, for instance, is set up to go out after random periods of time. Each time you click to attempt to re-ignite it, there’s something like a hidden coin flip to determine if it comes back on. This led to some wonderfully heart-pounding situations in which I was plunged into total darkness, knowing there were cannibals stalking me, and my lighter clicked five, six, seven, or maybe even eight times before the flame returned and allowed me to get my bearings. The cave cannibals seem scripted to flank, disorient, and spook you with their erratic movements rather than going straight for the kill, which is further proof that the team behind The Forest has a strong understanding of how to inspire horror.

“ The story you discover down in those depths is worth the trek.

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On top of your food and water gauges, a sanity score tracks how far you’re willing to go to survive, up to and including going native and cannibalizing the cannibals. The final moments of the story tie up the question of how much of your humanity you’re willing to lose to survive with an interesting moral choice. However, I do wish sanity had more noticeable impact on how you play – other than unlocking the ability to build effigies out of body parts to mark your territory when it gets below a certain point, the difference between 100 percent sane and zero felt pretty negligible.

“ The inhabitants of the island become more persistent and aggressive as time goes on.

Performance was also quite respectable across the board. A lot of open-world survival games tend to be resource hogs, but The Forest runs slick and smooth on my Core i7-4770K and GeForce GTX 1070 on max settings, no matter how much is going on at any given time. That’s impressive, given the sheer density of flora, ground cover, and other small details texturing the map. I encountered some minor intermittent bugs, such as the transition animations between areas of a cave that need to be loaded separately spitting me back out the way I came – but nothing that greatly hindered my ability to progress.