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This game tried to murder my computer.

Eyes of the Forest is an adventure/horror game that unfortunately fails at being much of either.

The game stars a young man named Sam Wraith who is dealing with the recent death of his wife, and laments his boring job at a university where he seems to get no respect, probably because he spends all his time slacking off, insulting his colleagues and calling his students names. He receives a mysterious pendant and a note from an old friend who seems to be onto something big, who invites Sam to come investigate an ancient mystery in a creepy forest in northern Germany. Surely nothing could go wrong!

The first and most obvious problem with this game is that the writing is atrocious. The game is in serious need of a proofreader, virtually every sentence suffers from some error or another. Most sentences are not capitalized or punctuated and this immediately ruins any sense of immersion or atmosphere as the player is constantly distracted by the onslaught of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors.

And now we know why.



The writing fails to engage, Sam comes across more as a rude, obnoxious kid than a college professor, and combined with the lack of grammar it can be hard to follow the narrative in more than a general sense. I never felt any empathy for the protagonist or any interest in his struggle or helping him solve the mysteries he was faced with.

Another serious issue is that there is zero graphical consistency. The game borrows facesets from every artist and style you've ever seen, nothing matches and again, this detracts seriously from the game. A horror game in particular relies on drawing the player cohesively into the world, and anything that distracts from this a problem. In this case, the complete lack of consistency is a serious problem. The game does try to make use of a few choice innovations like 3D movies and item animations, which are nice and I would generally say they aren't a bad addition on their own, but as it stands it's just one more graphical style on top of many others.

The game's mapping is amateurish, not necessarily bad mind you, but it suffers a lot of problems characteristic of new RPGMaker users. Maps are far too big and lack focus, the mapper instead focuses on filling these huge maps with random clutter or swathes of empty space. Smaller, more compact mapping would help focus the game world, make the gameplay smoother, and draw the player's attention where you want it to go. Right now, it's pretty easy to get lost or bored.

Speaking of getting lost, the game has a pretty serious lack of telling you where to go or what to do. When Sam goes to work, I spoke to a few professors who wanted me to do errands for them. Most of these are just flavor text, but in one case the errand was actually what the game wanted me to do, rather than just idle conversation. You also spend a lot of time wandering around searching for triggers or items. Searching for items is part of an adventure game and isn't bad on its own, but the sprawling and difficult to navigate maps make the hunt less enjoyable than it could be.

Finally, the game's programming also detracts from the experience. Many maps make use of lightning effects that I suspect use parallel processes that never turn off. This causes many maps to lag extravagantly. On one map, the processing got so bad that my computer actually died in protest. No, the game didn't crash, my computer literally turned itself off, and wouldn't turn back on for several minutes.

You...might want to look into this. A handy hint is to add a 0.1 frame wait to any parallel process, which keeps it from running infinitely as quickly as possible.

_____________


It's hard to recommend this game in its current form, because almost everything about its presentation is off-putting. This is a shame because the custom artwork on the game's profile looked promising, and a story about mysterious old gods in the forest could be a compelling horror game. But as it stands, this game would need a serious graphical overhaul, and an enormous amount of proofreading and editing to make this game palatable.

Seems tragic, since it had so much promise.

I'm not giving this game a score because I can hardly consider its current form to be playable, much less near completion. Also I am biased against games that try to murder my computer.

Posts

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Wow, that's disheartening. I tried to select face sets with a certain degree of artistic consistency.

You didn't mention anything from the second half of the game. Did you get that far?

The parallel processes that put lighting effects onto things all have delays of a second or so and I've never known them to cause things to crash, or lag.

Well, shame you didn't like it.

I don't know about barely playable, that's a huge exaggeration.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
If this game were a third grade English paper, it would rate a zero. That screenshot wasn't cherry-picked, every piece of dialogue is like that.

Some serious proofreading to clean that up would go a long way towards making this game playable.

Judging from your posts and review writing, you seem pretty capable of writing, so I don't think making your game legible is a lot to ask. Proper spelling and grammar is a requirement on this site.

For the record, I do like the concept art.
I didn't have any performance problems with the game on my computer, which is an old 3.0ghz single core with just 2gig of ram. I tried running it on an old 700mhz laptop though, and yeah that made it unplayable.

The item you were probably missing was the dog's chain. Once you have the backpack and the chain, and the coat, I think, you can move to the next section.

I do agree that the game gives off a very early Rm2k vibe in terms of mapping, but later areas do improve.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
I didn't miss the dog chain!
Yea dude, the script is full of spelling errors, I can see you've raised legitimate points, I just really don't think that this'd make your computer crash. Especially not for the reason you've given. I mean you must have it open in rpg maker to see those events, go and look at the "waits" in them. They are all longer than the 0.1 you suggest.

My laptop from 2004 which doesn't have the system spec to run photoshop has played through the game doesens of times. Are you sure you didn't have heaps of updates or downloads going, or a virus or something?

Only 2gig of ram, killer wolf...that's amasing.
I've been saying for a while that when the plot's finished I'm going to redo Sam's house and make the maps smaller and more concise, I don't want to change the university though. I know people will say that big, open maps are amaturish but universities are big and empty, and I like it quite a lot.
On one map, the processing got so bad that my computer actually died in protest.


wow. this may be the strongest dis-endorsement of any game i've ever seen
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