My earliest days gaming were spent playing colorful platformers on my Super Nintendo and Game Boy Color. Because of my gaming heritage, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for pixelated platformers. It’s a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is that I feel excited, true genuine excitement, when I see a new pixel platformer release. Nostalgia immediately surges through my brain and I feel the crisp warmth of childhood feelings settle into the sardonic, arthritic joints of my nearing-30 psyche. It’s my Chicken Soup for the Jaded Soul, and it’s wonderful that there are still a few things that can provide me with this feeling.
The curse is that when the pixelated platformer isn’t up to par, it’s particularly devastating. Just like that one Christmas where Santa didn’t get me the Batmobile I never told anyone you wanted. He should have just known!
Adding to that disappointment is the necessity of brevity. My time is more valuable to me now than it was when I was a child, so having to go back through content I already passed through feels like having to re-read a chapter of a book just to have access to the next chapter.
This was Fox n Forest’s biggest detractor for me.
Yeah, I could be super thorough and find each hidden item the first time I play through each level, but that would add a tremendous amount of time spent in each level, particularly when I’m discovering it as I go. Once again, that’s time I just don’t have to commit to a game like Fox n Forests. This is the kind of game I’m going to spend a few 30-minute sessions with on my couch before bed, it was nothing I envisioned myself playing for longer than a week.
Fox n Forests’s main mechanic is the ability to flip-flop the seasons. The game’s levels take place in one of the four seasons, and thanks to some talking-tree-friend magic, the vulpine protagonist has the ability to temporarily shift from, for example, spring to winter.
This ability changes the level’s layout, allowing the player to traverse across once-dangerous (fall in the water and you die) lakes, or use falling leaves as platforms in autumn to reach new heights that were unreachable in the spring. The logic behind it is clever and switching between the seasons happens fast enough that you can jump off the ground in the spring and land on the ground in autumn.
Throughout each level are evil creatures, from bugs to monstrous tree folk, who largely stick to their predetermined routes and can be dispatched with some quick attacks. The fox has both melee and ranged abilities, so you are free to dispatch monsters however you wish, and you’ll quickly learn the easiest ways to kill a particular monster because each level only has about four or five different types of monsters.
Also in each level are collectibles like currency and special items that you can use to buy upgrades for your abilities and weapons, as well as magic seeds that you need to progress to the next area of the game.
The magic seeds were hidden in random locations throughout each level. The majority of them I found by accident, accidentally swiping a bush and out popped a magic seed, or running to the edge of a cliff to see if anything was below and running into an invisible magic seed on my way to investigate. The placement of the seeds didn’t make much sense to me…they were just there…and they weren’t particularly challenging to obtain. They didn’t even feel like rewards.
This really was my biggest problem with Fox n Forests. “Run around a level enough before you can get to the next zone” is not a great gameplay principle to implement into a game. The game just felt artificially long because of it, and judging by the fact that the gameplay map looks relatively small, I get the feeling that the developers might have added this in so that players didn’t beat the game in a few hours and complain about it. Which is surprising since there are full gameplay walkthroughs on YouTube that clock in just under four hours.
I made it through the first zone and the first boss fight. Shortly after battling the boss, I realized I was forcing myself to continue playing. I wasn’t having much fun. The combat wasn’t great (the directional attacks were a sore spot through my entire time playing, they just never seemed to connect like they should) and the enemies were mostly path-based and predictable. Having to go back through levels to unlock more levels was a chore, and the upgrade system was limited and uninspiring, there just wasn’t anything cool I wanted to unlock.
Fox n Forests isn’t a bad game, it’s too simple though. The charm of flipping around the seasons wears off quickly, and without that mechanic you’re left with a generic action platformer. With so many game options available, there are just better ways to spend your money, and your time.
Not Recommended – Flipping the seasons is neat at first, but once you realize that’s the game’s singular feature, Fox n Forests gets old quickly.
A retail copy of this game was provided to Epic Brew by the developer.
