Children of the Forest Early Review: The taste is right, but not enough

Authentic forest taste

Neither Sons of the Forest nor its predecessor, The Forest, are honestly much like horror games.

"The Forest" is a work that doesn't have a flood of jump scare, nor is it a whole fantasy thing like demons and ghosts. At first glance, it looks like egg scones sold at a street breakfast restaurant, which looks quite average and smells quite average.

However, as we all know, horror games are thrillers when played by one person, challenges when played by two people, and funny shows when played by three people. And the players who break through the world of "Forest" are mostly in groups - to be precise, this makes the "Forest" gaming experience full of gray humor.

Facing the hordes of wild people in the game, it is trembling and turning around and walking away alone; Two players, that is, carry a spear and touch the bow, or fight to the death, or fight and retreat; Three or more people, that is to carry the wild man around the campfire, eat its flesh, and dra its bones. For a while, you can't tell who is a wild man and who is prey.

The Forest also has a unique and fairly free survival building system. Players need to collect building materials such as logs, branches, stones, and rope to build their own huts, or survival fortresses. And the system also has some weird buildings – such as slides.

The slide system turns The Forest into a collection of grey humor. He makes the player become a roller coaster designer who does not do his job, which is similar to the good job of "the old father who is not confused is addicted to chopping trees and making slides, holding the turtle shell every day and shouting, wandering around and ignoring the kidnapped young son".

This absurd, unprofessional look and feel of gameplay against the backdrop of a poignant story makes The Forest both separate from the horror genre and distinct from most survival experiences. At the same time, this is the core experience that all "Forest" lovers talk about the most.

And this special flavor is also well inherited by his sequel "Children of the Forest". To be precise, in Children of the Forest, the flavor changes a little bit—it becomes more serious and real.

First of all, it is worth mentioning that the production team, Endnight Games, has been emphasizing "stronger wild man AI" since the announcement stage.

The savages of the generation of "The Forest" are ignorant and bold. They are like reckless and stunned people, who like to swarm up and cast righteous gang beatings on players. This style fits well with the identity of the "wild man" and is satisfied with the player's stereotype of "cannibal" - crazy, cruel, and pathetic island cannibal barbarians.

But the wild man of the second generation of "Children of the Forest" has a more "human" taste.

They will grieve and cry. When the player sends away a passing unknown savage, its companion – or companion – will kneel in front of the corpse and cry. Even if the murderer of the "tragedy" is standing on the side fully armed, this fellow savage will still wail sadly and ignore the player.

I am a good-hearted person who cannot see these sufferings. So, I tend to send them together without hesitation.

In addition to grieving the loss of his companion, the wild man behavior of "Children of the Forest" is also more complex and humane. For example, they have significant curiosity. When players are logging in the forest to build houses, uninvited guests will stay nearby from time to time. Sometimes, they take the initiative to attack. Sometimes, they just crouch on a stone and watch. Just like when I was a child, I liked to lie on the railings of construction sites and watch the workers dust.

The wild men of Children of the Forest will be equally fearful.

When they fall to the ground with serious injuries, they will keep whimpering and wailing. These cannibal brutes lie on their sides on the ground, swinging their hands and feet frantically, trying to escape the player's clutches. If the player uses the same trick in an area, such as trolls, to send away too many wildlings. Their companions will disperse the moment they see the player raise their guns, revealing their fear of the "Boom stick."

Savages also have clear class and camp distinctions. Savages who live in caves all year round lose their eyes, have pale skin and are less mobile in the sun. The wild people active on the surface are more like ancient humans who entered the safari period, wearing bone armor or leaf armor, and the warriors in the tribe will also wear gold masks.

Surface Savages will have Scouts and other characters, who will try to avoid engaging the player, and then use their voice to call friends and friends to defeat the fallen player. The scouts of the cave wildlings will call in some more terrifying ruthless characters. Faced with hordes of monsters, the player's best resort is often to turn in.

And these two wild people are obviously friends and foes, and they can even be said to be the relationship between hunters and prey. Players can find the mutilated body of the cave wildman in the camp of the surface wildling, or the upside-down body of the surface savage in the cave. If these two parties meet, they will even ignore the player and beat each other on the spot. Players can take the opportunity to slip away or risk staying next to eat melons to make yellow finches.

To be precise, the wild men of Children of the Forest are not only more terrifying, fierce, and cunning than the generation, but also more human-like. Even an old "tortoiseshell roller coaster tycoon" like me can't chew on jerky, a specialty of the Forest series, as much as the first generation did. Even in the early days of the game, due to some pity and emotional discomfort, there was a famine for a while, leaving the game characters in a starving situation.

This is a unique experience that obviously does not exist in the first generation of "The Forest".

Hand-sharpened fence walls, very fresh and tiring

In addition to the more humane Savage AI system, the Forest's construction system has also been reforged with a more realistic and cumbersome free construction mode for Children of the Forest. Of course, Endnight Games still has several building blueprints for players - such as hunting lodges and watchtowers. However, these prefabricated buildings are often simple and small, and if you want to own your own big house, you have to do it yourself.

The free-build system is fairly simple in nature, and Endnight Games tries to incorporate some real-world elements into the game. This system is not actually scientific, but it combines a lot of paradoxical common sense: for example, the player stacks logs on top of each other to form a wooden wall; Holes in the wall with an axe are doors and windows; Splitting logs is planks and so on.

Of course, the construction system of "Children of the Forest" also has some anti-realistic elements full of gameplay. The player takes on the role of Captain America in the Marvel Universe, carrying two logs over the mountains and walking like a fly. When building a house, players can open bricks with their bare hands and split two-meter-long logs with an axe. The clever combination of realistic and anti-realistic elements makes the realistic construction in the game neither as boring as building a house in the real world, nor as "supernatural" as the generation of blueprint modes. To be precise, Child of the Forest's free-build mode is more eclectic, immersive, and fun.

And this idea of finding a balance between gameplay and realism is also reflected in all aspects of Children of the Forest - for example, the crafting mode of this game.

Each synthesis the player makes in the game triggers a short animation – whether it's stuffing strips of cloth into vodka to make Molotov cocktails, or hand-blending plants to make herbs. These fun little animations are also fresh enough for first-time players.

However, if players have to watch these "unskippable cutscenes" over and over again when making props in large quantities, even the most interesting and fresh design will be offensive. But if you skim these animations, it will lower the "realism" and "immersion" of the game's main theme by a notch.

Endnight Games made a rather clever choice in this regard – fast forward. That is, as the number of crafting items increases, the player's character's crafting action will become faster and faster. It's like a clumsy newcomer, an old assembly line worker who has been gradually honed into a sharp hand. This design can be said to have found a relatively balanced midpoint in authenticity and gameplay.

Walking in the snow leaves snow marks

In fact, if you take a closer look at Children of the Forest, you will find that its core gameplay is basically unchanged from "The Forest". Players still need to go down to the cave to collect special items to advance the story. The "intelligent savage AI" and free construction system featured in "Children of the Forest" are more like advanced upgrades to the game system of "Forest", which is the icing on the cake.

Since the game is still in the "Early Access" stage, the actual gameplay period of Children of the Forest is not long. The plot line can be said to be a semi-finished product, and it only took me 15 hours to complete the broken main line. And in this short game flow, more than half of the time is spent collecting materials and building bases.

The two NPC companions in the game - Kevin and Furgina - also have many players call her "wife", and the help to the player is not obvious. Kevin can be called a tool man, a walking log porter. His biggest help is to help players collect supplies - such as stones, branches, and logs - but the efficiency is not impressive. My friend who played with me once joked that Kevin was a generation of log trailers - the only use was to use some bugs (I mean game features) to brush logs.

And Fergina is quite uncontrollable.

The conditions for her to join the player team are not clear. Even after joining, players can't issue instructions for Kevin the same way they do with Kevin. Although Fergina can wield both a troll, and a pistol, since she spends most of her time wandering around the map, she has little help other than helping the player guard the base. In fact, players who lose their pistols and trolls have severely lost their output ability and risk violent death at any time. And at this stage, there will be some bugs in the multiplayer mode, and the guns handed over to the "wife" by the player will disappear after the save restart, and the valuable weapons will be lost in vain.

To be precise, the current stage of "Children of the Forest" is like a powerful version of "The Forest" that lacks many puzzle pieces. The elements that once made old players relish are still full of flavor. The actual gameplay look and feel also strikes a balance in gameplay and entertainment.

But the content of the game is still too little to support a relatively complete gameplay loop. For example, Child of the Forest's construction system is realistic and fun, but the variety is severely limited, and players can only dance in shackles, build some ugly angled roofs and straight and monotonous log walls.

Fergina sits on a bench with a square matchbox in the background

The sense of unfinished main plot of "Children of the Forest" is also quite serious. With a few cutscenes and a few fragmented clues, it is completely impossible to piece together a complete story chain. At the same time, many players complained that the game was optimized quite badly, and in my actual experience, I also faced problems such as frame drops and sudden freezes several times. To be precise, this is a common problem with many "Early Access" stage games.

However, it is foreseeable that "Children of the Forest" will become a masterpiece after "The Forest". Whether in terms of graphics or gameplay, this work has full potential.

But it will obviously take some time for potential to translate into results.