The First Tree

You play as a fox that searches for her children. The dialogue, provided by the developer and his wife (characters are called Rachel and Joseph), states that this is a recollection of Joseph’s dream.

As you find spots to dig, this triggers more dialogue that describes the relationship between the man and his father. Across the landscape you may find objects that were mentioned in the dialogue such as a wooden model tank, or a barbershop sign.

I knew there was a great chance I’d hate this game because I tend not to like these pretentious “walking simulators”. If you have a good story to tell, most of the time, it makes sense to have it in a book, unless the visuals or game mechanics really support the story.

The dialogue was fine, but I felt it was quite disjointed and didn’t get the point across. It sounded like he had a decent childhood, but then there were a few moments of rebellion during his teenage years. There’s a section where it seems he reluctantly went camping with his Dad, then suddenly the next dialogue states that his Dad is dead and “the perpetrator stared at him”. To me it sounded like his Dad got murdered in front of his own eyes, which was a bit of a jarring change in tone. However, in the next level, he casually mentions his Dad died alone in the wilderness. So I have no idea what actually happened. It’s almost like I missed a lot of dialogue, which is a massive problem in a story-based experience.

The landscapes are nice to look at, although there’s quite a lot of noticeable pop-up. The areas are often essentially large squares and it takes quite a long time to move from one point of interest to the next.

Points of interest are usually seen from afar as shafts of light. There are small stars to collect along the level, some of these guide you through the level, but they are often scattered too far so you sometimes feel a bit lost.

There’s a tiny amount of platforming, and I thought there was going to be some clever sections when you get introduced to these purple butterflies. You need to collect 3 groups of them in order to leap over a cliff wall. When you jump, you lose the butterflies, so you need to work out the correct route to collect them all without jumping. This was just used once though.

On one of the levels after that, I found a rock labelled 0/3. I pressed every button to try and interact with it. I found all 3 and managed to activate the final one, so had to backtrack to the others, then backtrack again to finish the level. The thing is, I was trying for ages to activate the other rocks. Even though I eventually managed it, I still don’t know how to do it.

The foxes walking animations seem fine but then the jumps look very stiff and the falling animation can look bad. The walking is far too slow, so you just press a button to switch to running mode. It’s still too slow given the size of the environment.

It feels like padding, but when it is only a 2 hour game - it shows how barebones the content really is. I did wonder how long the dialogue would be if it was a podcast; probably 20 mins of dialogue, if that.

There’s a few sections that were far too dark. In one of the final areas, you are forced to your walking speed. You have to slowly walk on a tree root in the dark, but then I fell off because I didn’t see the sharp turn, and had to slowly backtrack. It was painful, but then there is an epilogue. I had to put my TV on max brightness just to navigate out of the house, then was walking aimlessly into invisible walls and tiny fences that I couldn’t see. It was a painful ending to the game. I was going to score it a 3/10, but you have to take a point off for that abysmal ending.