I’ve been bouncing between playing Hitman: Blood Money and the alpha of The Forest. Both are tough games but for different reasons.
Hitman: Blood Money is the first Hitman game I’ve actually made any progress in – I tried the first game and couldn’t make it past the second mission. Blood Money seems easier to figure out what’s going on around you, but is still unforgiving.
It’s an interesting game in that the focus isn’t on just rushing through a level, but rather taking your time with each one, probing the map, working out your strategy, trying things out and reloading saves when things go awry. Your final successful play through might only take 15 minutes, but the development of your approach can eat up a whole hour. Sometimes it can feel very trial-and-error and not all that fun, but when things click and you figure out another step in your plan it’s great.
The Forest… I want to like it, I really do. The premise feels a lot more intriguing than other open world survival games, the enemies are menacing and threatening and legitimately dangerous, and despite being a buggy alpha the graphics and the aesthetic are solid. Unfortunately at this stage in development two things stand out to me as issues. One is the lack of an endgame – the developers have yet to implement the game’s plot so as to keep it under wraps, which means there’s nothing to do right now other than build a base, survive and explore the small portion of the island that’s been built.
The second thing is much more frustrating to me: right now the game feels completely unbalanced to the point of being impossible to make any meaningful progress. The aim is to survive on the island by avoiding and/or fending off the cannibals on the island for long enough to build a base to protect yourself and live in. Both of these aims are near-impossible.
The cannibals are too numerous to avoid, as they constantly patrol the island in large groups and seem to be scouring every nook and cranny, making it impossible to avoid being found before you have a safe camp to sleep in. Their AI is meant to be intelligent, which I appreciate, but they also have the advantage in being psychic as they always end up homing in on wherever the player is active. Once they discover the player they will continually send in progressively larger groups to attack you, which is impossible to fend off as a single cannibal can down you in two hits, while your attacks will take around 6-8 solid hits with an axe to kill an enemy.
If it were possible to build a safe camp in order to take shelter from cannibal attacks I wouldn’t mind so much. The game has a building system which allows you to set up walls, traps, and other useful structures that in theory would keep you safe and healthy. In practice though you can never get yourself established in time, as right now nearly every structure in the game takes an unreasonable amount of resources to build.
The basic sleeping shelter the game recommends you to build takes eight logs (plus other resources), while cutting down a tree will give you a maximum of four logs and you can only carry two at a time. This quickly creates several problems – every tree you cut down and every journey to and from your camping spot takes time, and the more time passes the more likely it is that cannibals will come wandering by and the closer you get to night. You can’t really do anything at night as this is when cannibals become more active, sending out larger patrols that are more actively searching for you. Ideally you can skip night by sleeping, but unless you can build a safe shelter before nightfall you won’t be able to. And a sleeping shelter on its own won’t be enough to keep you safe, as sleeping out in the open means you might wake up in the middle of the night to find a group has discovered you. Building walls to keep you safe requires even more logs, which in turn requires even more tree-cutting and time invested – time that you don’t have.
Every playthrough I’ve attempted has ended in me setting up the beginnings of a camp, being discovered by cannibals while gathering the resources I need to get started, and then being constantly harassed until I’m overwhelmed by enemies stronger and more numerous than me, usually around the first night of the game. It is an early alpha that’s still very early in its development, so I’m confident that the developers will eventually sit down and adjust the game’s difficulty curve to make it fun-challenging instead of fuck-you-challenging. In the meantime I don’t think I’ll be playing it again until more significant things are added or changed.
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