The Forest Cathedral

This game is a short story about Rachel Carson. It lacks polish, but it is not a bad game. This game suffers from bad game design decisions like these: -the game starts with a cutscene and then you play as a bug from 3rd person and the game shows you that to move you have to use WASD but you can only use W while playing as a bug. Pressing other keys, stops you from moving. Why show other keys? Just tell me to use W to move when I cant use other keys -next the game tells you to use WASD to move and LMB to interact and youre in first person view but it then forces you to press Esc to go to settings and look up other controls... Why do that? Just display a message on the screen that controls can be found in the settings. -the UI is just big yellow text on the screen... thats it. This includes subtitles. Very basic approach to UI and it makes the game devs look lazy. Especially for subtitles you should allow people to select color and outline of the text as well as the size. The subtitles shouldnt take the third of the screen by default. If you have a static UI text on the screen at least make sure its readable on any background -the game has a nice loading screen with a fish however this game also uses black fade out transitions where it moves you to a totally different location. It seems like it is loading during those fade outs but its just a black screen -the tasks you get to do are very short, followed by a black fade out or loading screen. why design it this way? Put the user in an area, give them a set of tasks and let them do them all, without the need for 10 black fadeouts -lots of invisible walls even where there are no visible things in the way. -object and shadow pop in -notepad lines are too close to each other so they partially overlap each other -background music is louder than the voice actors voice in the intro -the game uses tv screens with a 2D character that you control. you do puzzles here and then it takes you back to your 3d character. The main 3d character actually talks to this little 2D guy. The problem is that when in 2d form, youre doing puzzles but they repeat. Why not design new puzzles for the 2D guy even when doing the same 3d action? -3d character has a tool which is screen that shows you something different then your character can see. A different sort of vision, however it does not seem to be right when it comes to positioning. Its as if it was using incorrect FOV, different from your FPS 3D characters view. Its hard to navigate when using it. Feels too zoomed in. -the game heavily relies on depth of field effect, however it does not seem to be set up correctly. it sometimes focuses on incorrect objects - look around in the cabin to see what i mean. -random floating objects. not correctly placed and very much ruining the experience -microstuttering -blurry textures on certain parts of ground Here are some things I liked: +background music(ost?) is actually really nice but rarely actually playing. +the main character is quite pleasant and I like the voice acting +the story, which is based on a real life story of Rachel Carson