Forest Grove Review (PS5)

The season of big game launches is upon us, most publishers target us with big names and even bigger price tags. Among the well-known and tried IPs we also deal with smaller indie releases, that can function as digital stocking fillers. One such title is Forest Grove, an investigation game, taking place in a single house, full of puzzles. Is this game worth your time or are you better off watching an episode of CSI?

Forest Grove cannot really be called an adventure game, but it is not a walking simulator either. It can best be described as an investigation game, where you use futuristic technologies to try to figure out a case that left the police clueless. It is up to you as an investigator of the Remote Forensic Bureau to step in and continue on the trail of breadcrumbs left by the officer who tried to solve the case before you.

After a short briefing you will step onto the Nanodeck that based on the evidence available will rebuild the family house of Zooey Kunstmatigaard, the victim of the missing person case you are investigating. As you might have guessed already, the action takes place in the future, yet despite the Nanodeck and some hints in the plot about the issues caused by the evolution of technology, the game does not look very futuristic.

As a special investigator you are thrown in a dark house equipped with a Remote Powered LightStick, basically a simple floor lamp you can move from one room to another, a flashlight and some floating cameras. Using these tools, you have to uncover DNA traces, fingerprints, various residues, find notes and hack safes and laptops.

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There is no action, no adrenaline, no rush and no pressure. You can explore the three floors at our own pace and using a very limited set of tools put together the events that lead to Zooey’s disappearance. You have to use your intuition to find the culprit, and though the developers were bragging that they do not hold the hand of the player, the game offers plenty of options to track all the evidence you have collected.

From blood stains to riddles, from details about the characters neatly stacked in virtual dossiers to hidden rooms, the game has plenty of clues and information, and it is up to you as the player to figure out which ones are actually relevant to your case. Because the course of your investigation will reveal quite a few details about the other characters in Zooey’s life, each with their own problems, many of them being shady, but not related to the disappearance of the young girl.

The gameplay itself is quite repetitive, but as long as you are paying attention you cannot really miss anything. The puzzles themselves are not hard and the riddles require you to check every nook and cranny, to find the solution, but once you find the hidden note or the missing data, these are quite easy as well.

Overall, the game can be finished in less than two hours, the most challenging part being the reconstruction of various dialogues. By finding small images of characters in certain rooms, you can use the floating cameras to reconstruct various scenes that took part in the past.

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The blurry silhouettes will help you position the camera in the right angle and by following the blue and yellow indicators you will soon get a precious morsel of information. Less interesting, but somehow based on the same principle, you can also reconstruct audio files by moving the analog stick to the left or to the right until you find the correct pitch.        

But the short gametime and basic gameplay are not the biggest issues of Forest Grove. The main problem is that the game fails to engage with you and captivate you. Unlike a good detective novel or even an episode of a forensic themed TV series you have no connection to the characters, and they seem as unreal as their holographic representation. Without an emotional connection Forest Grove is nothing more than a completely forgettable experience, a pilot episode that would not warrant the investment in a TV series. 

The visual style and the graphics do not help either. Even for an indie title the game looks basic, the animations and character designs sticking out as the least polished parts. Forest Grove is not even close to the visual standards we have in 2023. On the technical side we can also mention that in general the control works well, but the cursor can be too sensitive, and it feels like they tried to emulate the movement of a mouse.

The voice acting is a bit all over the place, some of the dialogue being overly dramatic like in a soap opera, while at other times completely lacking any emotion. Combined with a cliché story and dialogues, the overall effect is mediocre.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion