FOX n FORESTS Reviews

Is fun, nostalgic and with good music and sprites.

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.