Elevating a Story with Specificity

So this might be an off take because I haven’t finished the game, but I think it’s a real shame that the main character of The Forest isn’t given more personality, and I’ll explain what I mean.

I’m not far through the game, to be clear. I have played about 13 in-game days in my longest surviving save, but I’ve started over thrice, which has given me a good chance to explore the various sources of environmental storytelling that are available without going into the caves too deeply. So, if you’re familiar with the game’s mid to late game, and I’m completely off base I’d love to know.

One of my favourite set pieces that I’ve found so far is the Yacht. The Yacht is a boat moored just off the coast of the forest, near a landmark tree. It’s laden with a few useful pieces of gear, one of the few useable beds that you don’t create yourself, and a couple of pieces of storytelling that to me felt really powerful. One is that there’s religious iconography around. Bibles and such. You get the impression that the Yacht owners might be evangelicals. There’s also signs of a missing child, which reminds the player that they’re searching for their own missing son (taken from the crashed plane in the prologue by some sort of blood demon looking thing). Were these evangelicals looking for their missing child before they got here? Were they looking for someone else’s missing child? Did the child go missing while they were here? It’s not clear from the unlocked portion of the boat, and I haven’t gotten into the locked part yet.

There’s also blood everywhere, of course. Signs that the ship has been raided by the people watching you from the border of the forest, across the water. Making it clear the boat isn’t going to make you safe.

But then as you progress, if you (like I did in this save) visited the boat on your first night, and you investigate further inland you find signs of earlier missionaries. Less evangelical modern visitors and more classic style colonising missionaries. Their tents are scattered around, sturdy even as they’re clearly made of old materials, and their campsites are almost all near cave entrances.

In the easily accessible caves, the Christian imagery is one of the consistent pieces of the puzzle. You find the body of one of those old missionaries, seemingly locked in a cave for decades. You find bibles sunk in underground lakes, skulls and candles set up like shrines to saints.

As an ex christian from an evangelical denomination it paints a specific picture of weapons wielded against those wanting to spread the word of god. Missionaries not welcome here. The kind of story we were told to try and convince us that the oppression of Christians was relevant to our lives. Or, when I thought about the way the iconography has been arranged, maybe the opposite. Maybe the many legged mutants are a kind of misguided worship.

But that’s the problem. The horror, and this is a horror game, would be in the specificity.

Are you trying to scare me by aligning me with the colonisers and evangelicals (and therefore attributing indigenous status to the mutant cannibals - which would not be a great call) or are you making an interesting reference to the way that controlling churches will separate you from family and overtly watch you in an attempt to control you? Or are you just using religiosity as a vague symbol of threat, leaving it up to the audience to decide what to be scared of?

One of the biggest clues to the cannibals being the Christians in this scenario is what happens if you get kidnapped by them. As you escape you can find a piece of paper with a note written in red paint - “A jealous god punishes a parent’s faults upon their children”. In getting this quote accurate I have discovered that the fandom wiki has Theories about this but I’m ignoring them for now.

My point is that the horror could be so much more effective with just a little more background on the player character. Giving the player any discernible background beyond white and presumably American, would give the religious throughline of the game a lot more power. Is this a secular character completely unfamiliar with bible verses and the history of missionaries? Is this a religious or ex religious character all too familiar with the way cults operate? Someone who sees themself in the yacht left behind by the evangelicals? Someone who might turn to the bibles littered around the landscape for comfort? Or someone who might burn them for fuel (an option not given in the game, btw)?

A little specificity, a little more personality, and not only does the game’s story become more personal and horrifying, but it also gives more of an opportunity for the game’s number one quest “find Timmy” to be more urgent and more important to the player.

There’s 2 ways to do this without altering the game in any big way. 1) include a church in the picture of the family Timmy draws at the beginning of the game. If Timmy thinks family is “me and dad and church” that’s a huge flag, without changing literally anything else about the game. 2) Voice lines. I’ve talked before about the fact that the voice lines in The Long Dark give the player character a lot of personality, but in The Forest they are noticeably missing. Fair enough, frankly! A voice actor is expensive. But imagine. You pick up a skull “this is grisly, but it could be useful”. You drop into the cave where the floor is littered in human hearts for some reason? “what the- ?” It’s simple, but it gives a bit of flavour. You see the piles of bibles and don’t take one? “I could burn those but it feels wrong.” You know something about the character immediately.

Now, why someone would think a bible is more unforgivable than a human skull in terms of light sources I’m not sure but hey, the mechanics of the game decided that, not me.

And here’s the thing. I understand why you wouldn’t spell these things out. You may think “ehh, gamers tend to be athiests or agnostic they probably won’t feel like religious trauma is a relatable story” or “we don’t want to alienate or piss off Christians” and you’d be making a sound business choice. And you’ll have a relatively popular game that says nothing in particular with its early game.

All this to say - where an everyman feels like the less alienating character choice, consider what is lost when losing specificity. What sacrifices are you making in your story in service of a hypothetical audience that might not get it?

I really loved Kayla of Ratwave Games’ blog post this month on this general topic and the tension between making a living and making art. So for further reading: The Indefinite Audience

And that’s it from me today. See you on stream! If you haven’t seen, my rig got an upgrade and things are a lot smoother over on twitch as of yesterday. Let’s really push it to the limits tomorrow with uhh… [checks notes] Dwarf fortress.

See ya!