FOX N FORESTS Review for PC

Fox N Forests is a tribute to 16-bit platformer games, down to the music, the level structure, and general feel of gameplay. Overall, the retro feel of your furry fox friend leaping from mushroom to stump, fighting bats and giant spiders, is satisfying and nostalgic. It achieves its job well: bringing you back in time to a tried-and-true method of gaming. But it also means there’s not much here that I would call groundbreaking.

Playing the fox Rick, you’re tasked with finding the bark of each season to return to the magical talking tree who sends you on your quest. This introduces the main gimmick behind the game, that you both control and travel through the four seasons (and maybe eventually a mysterious fifth season – but I won’t give it away).

This adds an interesting element to the game. Not only do you have your usual melee attacks, crossbow, and potions, but you can switch seasons at will. It could mean turning an ominous lake into a frozen walkway, or calming a swarm of angry bees. Definitely a fun twist, adding a new dynamic to both the levels and the boss fights.

While the classic platform style means your task is essentially to move from the left to the right, it’s always nice to have a game that rewards exploring. There are chests to uncover, magical seeds to find, caves to dive into, and secrets all around. New arrows can trigger magical targets, giving the game some incentive for multiple plays.

The one thing that takes away from that incentive is the seed mechanism. In order to advance to the next season, you have to have a pretty typical boss fight with some giant creature, but you also have to have collected all of the magical seeds from your level before you’re allowed to advance. That means that rather than being rewarded by a new place to explore after you kill the boss, you often have to backtrack and hunt for seeds in places you’ve already seen. So going back for another play-through is less interesting, as you’ve already basically been forced to explore all of the cool places the first time.

So Fox N Forests isn’t reinventing the wheel. And no one is asking it to. For the classic feel, the catchy music, the enjoyable gameplay, and the copious amount of fox puns, I’ll give Fox N Forests an 8 out of 10.

Here is the FOX n FORESTS Launch Trailer:

FOX N FORESTS is available for PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam.

Graham Marema

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Graham Marema is a senior at Davidson College, studying English with an emphasis on creative writing and film. She's from a tiny town called Norris, Tennessee, and in the summers she works at a creative learning camp in Asheville called AICL.

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