FOX n FORESTS Reviews

Is fun, nostalgic and with good music and sprites.

I think it's adorable! Inspired by Ghosts & Goblins stuff, a bit of Castlevania. I like it so far! Just got the second bark thingy and red arrows.

Fox 'n Forests is a pretty underrated SNES-style retro platformer that takes a little bit of time to figure out. It's a short game in terms of levels as it consists of only eight stages, but you have to re-enter each level two or three times to collect all of the items needed to finish it. SNES platform games ala Aero the Acrobat or Magical Adventure Starring Mickey Mouse were usually overly simplistic, so this is better than most of those games while still being pretty flawed in and of itself. You play as a fox who can manipulate the seasons and fire several magical arrows. You can slash at close range and only fire the arrows while standing. The controls seemed terrible at first, but after playing for a few hours I got pretty good at them. What I like about the game is all of the collectibles and upgrades. You can collect grindstones to upgrade your weapons and magic crystals to upgrade your magic. Enemies drop money that can be used to buy additional heart containers in the town. Later on you get a ground pound attack that's extremely useful. There are five bosses, and while they are not hard they do require a bit of effort to figure out. 100% completion took me a few hours after finishing the game. The most time consuming thing was collecting 9,999 gold and buying all of the upgrades. I had to grind through the first level about ten times to get enough money to do this. Beyond this the game's music is fantastic but doesn't entirely fit. Some of the songs sound like they'd be better in a PS1 RPG or a dungeon crawler-type game. The best level in the game has you changing the season from winter to summer to drain a lake and find collectibles hidden under the lake. There are also two flying stages that are pretty easy but break up the pace of the game, along with one stage where you are just climbing upward to reach the top of a mill. To complete the game you need to find seeds and this is where the game kind of starts to get bad because the seeds are sometimes well hidden but other times really terribly hidden. You have to beat some levels to get the arrow upgrades to hit the targets necessary to create platforms to find some of the seeds. The dumb thing is that sometimes you need to just stand on an empty platform for the seed to appear. This was a terrible design choice that forces you to just wander all over the place in the hopes that the seed will pop up. You need 24 seeds to finish the game and 40 to 100% complete it, so expect to spend a few hours hunting these down. The developer also released a guide on steam with a map so you can use that to speed up the process. I recommend it because otherwise there's no indication where the seeds are hidden. Fox 'n Forests isn't the best platform game I've played, but it is very polished and does a good job imitating an old SNES game while simultaneously being its own thing. I would have liked it if the puzzles require a little bit of thought and if the changing of the seasons aspect was a little bit deeper. It would've been better if you could change to all four seasons instead of just changing a single season to solve extremely basic puzzles. Sometimes it's utilized rather cleverly and other times it feels totally pointless. But when you factor in all of the content here and the fact that it's not very long it is a succinct and entertaining experience with just enough there to make it worth playing.

[h1]Okay, but there's better[/h1] The most 6/10 game I've played in a while. The aesthetics and art are genuinely beautiful and evocative of the best of the SNES and DOS eras, and the soundtrack is killer, but the gameplay ends up feeling more like a vessel for the artists' work rather than a game that truly stands out. Fox n Forests finds itself in an uncomfortable position where genre-defining giants like Hollow Knight, Sonic Mania and Celeste released a year or even only a couple months prior, and lacking much "sauce" of its own. The gameplay is extremely okay, almost feels like the quintessential "generic low frills platformer." The seasonal mechanic is neat, although marred by a long, non-cancelable animation to cast that provides zero i-frames and can end up with you taking a hit if you aren't careful or just get bad luck. Levels are decently designed and long, with plenty of secrets. Unfortunately, the game relies on a lot of backtracking every time you get a new arrow type to pad out the rather short runtime, with only 8 normal levels to go through. Movement speeds are kept modest, and the double jump feels tacked on more than anything - most of the jumps in the game require one, and the base jump height is so low that the game would've been better off just making you jump higher by default. There are a few sections here and there where you're asked to do a "midair double jump" by walking off a ledge instead of jumping off one, but that's the most clever thing the game does with it. This is the kind of stuff that gives the double jump as a mechanic a bad rap. It's also marred by some somewhat clunky unresponsive controls and annoying "end lag" periods that make the combat sluggish. Firing arrows is slow and doesn't really buffer your inputs very well, leading to a lot of dropped inputs. This is even worse when switching arrows around, where it feels like there's a long delay before you can actually fire after switching. You also can't move around while shooting, and can't do it midair either. Melee attacks can't be done from a standing position, you have to be crouching, holding up or in the air to do one, and they have TERRIBLE range, made worse by quite a few bad hitboxes. The two shmup sections are definitely the weakest link, becoming slow, boring autoscrollers and making you die in one hit. Hitboxes are awful here, and brushing up against any wall or surface is death. There's also a chase sequence platforming boss in the third season which was apparently infamous for requiring nearly frame and position perfect jumps to finish, although I beat it on the first try myself so it must have been fixed. Overall this game is an audio-visual treat, but is sadly in service to a kinda boring, generic game and setting with a super bog-standard simple story that isn't anything to write home about. The game isn't terribly difficult or frustrating even with all of the above negatives considered (I've played far worse) but it's only really worth it on a sale.

A really enjoyable 2D platformer, that is decently challenging to 100% (although not necessary to). I had a lot of fun with it, and you'll be revisiting levels for all the collectables if you do seek 100%. Also you play as a fox, always a plus!