The game currently has no scheduled final release date, it will instead be developed to completion and released through the Steam Early Access scheme. On May 22nd of 2014, The Forest will be released in its alpha stage on Steam.

• 1. Development
• 2. Story
• 3. Gameplay
• 4. Characters

Development

The Forest is an open world survival horror video game that is set in a large forested sandbox world that is generated by the Unity 4 game engine and can be operated with full Oculus Rift VR support. While we don’t know the exact date that development began, it was announced on June 14th of 2013 that The Forest was successfully Greenlit on Steam. 

On December 11th of 2013, it was announced through Steam that the games first alpha build release was expected to arrive early in 2014, although slightly later than initially expected, the game does have an alpha release date set for May 22nd of 2014. An experienced development team are in control of the title which has been called an “ambitious open-world horror game”. Coming from a varied background of respectable work such as the hit films The Amazing Spider Man 2 and Tron Legacy, the games’ visual influences are many and diverse.

Developer David Miranda developed an impressive skin shading system specifically for The Forest which will allow the game to have a more life like depiction of how light interacts with characters skin and materials in the game world. As the team mostly come from a visual effects background they were excited about new technology and lighting and shading techniques. Realism and immersion are said to be two important factors for the development team.

The game is also being developed with the intent of implementing Oculus Rift support to further increase player immersion, since the Facebook acquisition of Oculus and their Rift device there has been no news of this implementation being scrapped. There has been rumours of a multiplayer component being added to the game, but there is no confirmation yet.

Story

While not much information is available regarding the games plot, we do know this much. Players will take control of an unlucky survivor of an aeroplane crash that wakes up in the wreckage of the plane on an island that is inhabited by cannibals that kill out of necessity to eat rather than any actual evil intent.

Gameplay

Gameplay in The Forest is handled from a first person perspective and from the moment the player begins the game in their plane wreckage the task of survival begins. Whilst you may survive on what was on the plane for a short while, resources will start running out and the player will need venture out into The Forest. Here is where the crafting system will kick in which involves making a spear. The gameplay mechanics involve setting up fire to protect you from cold and base building.

Players must ensure they obtain drinking water from lakes to stay alive and protect themselves from dehydration. Cannibals that inhabit the island seem to act in a largely nocturnal manner, meaning that the player is safer during the day giving them plenty of prep time for the ever closing night. The Forest will indeed have an “ending”, but the developers want it to be a non essential part of the game, saying that some players will get so involved with just surviving that the actual ending will be lost on them.

Characters

Little is known about the characters in the game, presumably to better allow for the player to imprint themselves upon the in game character.

Player Character/Survivor – The main players character is the sole survivor of a plane crash which leaves him stranded in a cannibal ridden forest.

Cannibals – Although these cannibals are trying to kill the player as a source of food, they aren’t inherently evil. Showing compassion to their comrades, crying over the death of friends and even protecting others from your attacks.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game.

The full list is as follows – Bugbear Entertainment’s Next Car Game, Camtasia, Candle, Dusty Revenge, DwarfCorp, Eden Star (pre-alpha), Gimbal, Grimm, Higurashi When They Cry, Humans Must Answer, Lacuna Passage, Long Live The Queen, Monochroma, Mount Your Friends, Postmortem: one must die, SeaCraft, Superhot, Syder Arcade, theHunter, U55: End of the Line, Valdis Story Abyssal City, Warsow, World of Diving, WWII Online: Battleground Europe and Zombie Tycoon II.

Yes, Zombie Tycoon II.

Any of the above titles interest you at all? Let us know in the comments below.

In conversation with Gamasutra, Newell stated that, “The immediate goal was to give us more data in the selection process as we ramp up the tools needed to get us to our longer term goal of improving the overall throughput of the system.

“Before Greenlight, folks would send mail to us mail or fill out the posted submission form, hope that someone saw it and liked it, and waited in the dark for a reply. While it is not perfect, Greenlight helped us pull that process out of the dark and help with the selection process.”

There’s been talk of doing away with the voting and selection system, automating the process instead. Newell talks about developers possibly establishing their own stores through the Greenlight API. “Ultimately, we hope to increase our throughput so significantly that the conversation about selection becomes antiquated. Then we can debate our ability or inability to properly aggregate and display the increased volume of titles being offered.

“Votes on Greenlight provide a useful point of data in gauging community interest, but we’re aware that votes alone may be an inexact form of gauging customer interest. So we also try to incorporate additional information we have about factors such as press reviews, crowd-funding successes, performance on other similar platforms, and awards and contests to help form a more complete picture of community interest in each title.

“Much of the evolution of Steam and Greenlight is driven by what the community of gamers and developers tell us they want to see made possible. Right now, we’re focused on expanding the depth and breadth of our catalog. That expansion and addition of content is going to come with a need to innovate and iterate on how customers browse for games and evaluate potential purchases.

“Evolving our tools to allow us to publish more titles more frequently is the solution for the bottleneck. We’re working on it, and the 100 [Greenlighted games batch] was a big step towards the long term goal. This latest batch is both a celebration and a stress test of our systems. Future batches may not be as large but, if everything goes smoothly, we should be able to continue increasing the throughput of games from Greenlight to the store.”

Valve’s Greenlight featues, which allows community input in what games (mostly indie games) will be listed on Steam is a neat little concept, but its execution has been felt lacking, as rumblings have suggested that all may not exactly be well in Valveland.

Today, Valve has come out and recognized the problems, adding that it is working on fixing them. As reported by Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “The primary problem right now is that we simply cannot ship as many games as we’d like. There are many reasons for that, but at the end of the day, those don’t really matter to you, the developers, and nor should they. What matters is that we give customers the chance to buy your games and let them vote with their dollars. We realize that we are failing in this regard and are working to fix it.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time Valve has admitted to issues with the Greenlight system (they had a similar admission last year), and there are still multiple problems with the process, but it has seen some improvements. Maybe Valve will finally make the necessary changes and make Greenlight the effective process that it is supposed to be.