Tricks of light in the forest by Pseudavid
We’re a 12-year old girl getting up real early to go to the forest alone. Our aim is to find good samples for school and make nice photographs. While we’re not exactly forbidden to go into the forest, we also didn’t exactly ask permission, and it’s clear that our parents are wary of the landscape and don’t want us to turn too far.
Tricks of light in the forest has an interesting, ahem, trick when it comes to navigation: instead of using compass directions, we choose between ‘home’ and ‘forest’. This makes a lot of phenomenological sense. Behind us is the known and safe; in front of us, the unknown and potentially dangerous. It’s one of several ways that the games makes us feel apprehensive about the journey. Sure, it’s a nice walk in a lovingly described environment. We get to feel things, make photos, put pieces of moss in our collection, enjoy a drink from the stream, feel the dead leaves with our bare feet… what’s not to like?
But at the same time, the game gives us hints of danger. Impenetrable fog. Narrow tunnels. Bullet shells on the ground. Warnings by our parents. Noises of some large animal. The success of the game depends to a large extent on balancing these two moods: one of enjoyment, one of apprehension, which together make up the mental state of our protagonist. And I think it works. The player is constantly left guessing as to what is coming, as to what the mood of the piece is, is supposed to be, will turn out to be. Is the disaster with the boar a real disaster? Are monitor lizards really dangerous? Is this world more post-apocalyptic or more solarpunk?
And then we get to a torture and murder cabin, strongly hinted to be a left-over from a time when climate change denying conservatives were killing progressives, and we… don’t really understand what is going on, are happy with finding some earrings (who knows, they could be our grandmother’s, maybe our grandmother was murdered here!) and use the bleach to defeat some lizards. There’s a huge gap between us and the protagonist here; shades of Adrian Mole (where the main irony is that we understand things that Adrian is too young to grasp). But the balance remains. Maybe nothing much happened here. We’ll never find out, not in the game, at least.
An intriguing piece; a mood piece; but it takes a lot of cunning to craft a mood like this.