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Bought this on a GOG sale without too much thinking, but this time my half-assed half-reasoning was "hey, this game looks a bit pretentious, but also it's about nature and the cycle of life and such, this makes a bunch of reviewers really mad, let's see if this game is actually as bad as they say". This time it only cost me about a dollar, but I was getting a very short experience from it.
Screenshot stolen from the official website
A beautiful, 3rd-person exploration game centered around two parallel stories: a fox trying to find her missing family, and a son reconnecting with his estranged father in Alaska. Uncover artifacts from the son's life as he becomes intertwined in the fox’s journey towards The First Tree.
I started this game off with some mixed feelings. I absolutely loved running around as a fox and just exploring: the visuals, the colors, the landscapes, the music, the ambience all combine into a beautiful experience, with some quiet environmental storytelling. Then it gets interrupted by some dude going on and on about how he felt in his teenage years. I don't care about your inner world, I care about the beautiful Outside and touching grass! (without actually touching real grass, of course) Every time I dug up a relic of his past, it felt like I was punished rather than rewarded, just by the uselessness of those walls of text I'd have to listen to.
It took some time for an actual narrative to begin, and by then I started to feel invested. The game is short and the story is minimalist so I can't say much without spoiling, but I thought it was good and had an interesting ending. Grief is a major theme here, and that did not resonate with me quite so much as it could with other people, so I'd rate it a 7/10. Except, (and here is where I even more blatantly admit that my scores are not at all objective) I will add +1 to the score just to offset the "narrator sounds like a f****t" reviews, for a nice *8/10*, can recommend.
The First Tree has a native Linux port, though the sheer visual beauty of it does require some computing power, and certain areas were especially laggy. Luckily, the game offers a good range of graphics quality settings, and interestingly enough, the semi-cartoonish artstyle gains some new and interesting qualities at the "Lowest" setting: disabled shadows make the colors stand out more.
-- gardenapple 2022-08-26
