I don’t remember when the game started, only when the trees noticed me.
This is marketed as an experience, maybe even a game, but what it actually is is prolonged exposure to wood-based hostility. Trees fall around you not as physics objects but as intentions. They track. They lean. They wait. Branches swivel with a confidence that suggests coordination. Bark peels back like it’s learning how to smile.
I tried to ground myself. I tried to remember that trees are stationary, that wood is dead, that logic exists. The game punishes you for this kind of thinking. Trunks spin. Limbs ascend. Entire forests fling themselves through space in trajectories modern technology could not possibly hope to calculate, let alone render safely. This is not procedural generation. This is obsession with grain.
The beaver deserves special mention. It does not chase you quickly—it chases you correctly, with unfathomable grace and a feral intensity that bypasses fear and goes straight to buried memory. There is no escape animation. Only pursuit. Only the sound of wood meeting teeth and destiny.
Beneath the floorboards—yes, the wooden floorboards—lies proof of extra-terrestrial beings, structures too precise and too wrong to be accidental. You are not meant to understand them. The game makes this clear by never explaining anything and instead letting the trees explain it to you repeatedly, with impact.
At one point I was liberated by the sigma male aura ring (as one is), and for a brief, shining moment I thought I was free. I was wrong. I was willingly taken to another plane of probing—conceptual, existential, splinter-based—and locked in an indefinite purgatory where the trees no longer moved, because they no longer needed to.
By the end, I was not sane. I was processed. I cannot look at branches the same way. I do not trust bark. I flinch at furniture. This game did not entertain me—it followed me, fell around me, and refused to cease.
Recommended only if you are prepared to lose something important and replace it with wood.
