Review for The Fabled Woods
Some adventure games place emphasis on puzzle solving while others value narrative over all else. Then there are the growing number of titles that task the player with simply traversing an environment, letting the carefully designed surroundings do the lion’s share of the storytelling. CyberPunch Studios’ The Fabled Woods falls into the latter category, being a short and ultimately rather passive adventure that places you in the middle of the woods and essentially asks you to follow a narrow path until you reach the end. While other games like Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch have achieved great results with this now-familiar conceit, The Fabled Woods isn’t able to rise to the challenge quite as successfully. Instead, it’s a visually appealing but fairly superficial jaunt that comes up short on both narrative payoff and gameplay substance.
The game opens – where else? – in the woods, depositing you at the start of a trail with no other option but to follow it. Immediately the narrator, who introduces himself as Larry, directly addresses you. It seems you have no memory of him, but whoever you are, it is evident that Larry knows you and that you have in fact met before. Larry promises that all of your questions – whatever they may be – will be answered soon, and so off you set down the path.
The forest is the game’s main location, with the occasional detour through a cabin and a few more...surreal places before you reach the end. Regardless of where you are at any given moment, however, the environmental storytelling happening around you is always a bit on the light side, not offering quite enough discoveries to make The Fabled Woods the satisfying narrative experience it could have been. Turns out a lot of trees and underbrush just don’t have much interesting to say. It’s also a highly linear experience. Sure, you can stray a few feet off the path here and there (exploring a lakeside clearing, for instance), but you remain surrounded by Mother Nature most of the time, with the environment taking a back seat to the game’s voice-over narration in terms of what it contributes to the storytelling.
That said, the scenery certainly does look pretty. Shafts of sunlight piercing the overhead canopy and leaves on the trees overhead throw dappled shadows all around you that dip and sway in the breeze. A river casts rippled reflections as its waves softly lap the shore. The immersive feeling is aided by the realistic sounds of nature, often unobstructed by any music. The game’s soundtrack – generally made up of string-heavy compositions – only kicks in at certain times, typically underscoring a moment of tension or discovering a new location.
Outdoor spaces provide a number of picturesque vistas as you freely roam the 3D environments using standard first-person keyboard and mouse controls. For example, approaching a cliffside overlook provides an arresting view of a log cabin built on the banks of a sparkling lake as your next destination, as well as the path you’ll be taking to reach it. But while this paints the illusion of a wide-open space to explore, invisible walls constrict you to the literal path laid out before you, meaning you are essentially walking down a very pretty corridor constructed out of foliage rather than bricks and mortar.
What’s more surprising is that the handful of indoor locations aren’t fleshed out better by comparison. They look moderately lived in and there are some objects and furniture strewn about, but hardly anything of substance is brought to the narrative table. The only exceptions are one very early and one late-game instance that actually do it correctly, with plenty of visual clues inspiring a mental construction of the events that took place there. But for the rest, there’s little storytelling value in picking up and examining random packs of cigarettes, bottles of chemical solvents or flashlights stashed in otherwise empty dresser drawers. Apart from a newspaper clipping or two and a cheeky reference to Campo Santo’s superior Firewatch, there’s not even all that much to interact with. Puzzles barely exist either, or are just plain rudimentary, like a couple of locked doors requiring you to collect obviously displayed keys nearby.
Instead, there exists another sort of barrier to keep you from progressing through an area before its relevance has played out. After following the initial path for a bit, you will come across an abandoned campsite – a pitched tent, a gas cooker, a couple of lawn chairs and a picnic table – beyond which the path forward is obstructed. An on-screen message prompts you to press the space bar in order to “remember,” which in this case bathes the world in a red haze and slows your walking speed for a few seconds before returning to normal. While this vision mode is active (and it can be activated again and again without penalty or cooldown, making its brief duration an odd design choice), certain things that weren’t visible before will give off a bright glare.
In this early example, what appear to be drag marks lead back the way you came to an ominous interactive object that prompts a short dream-like section. Here you walk through an ethereal plane while the fate of the missing campers is revealed, ultimately triggering access to the next area of the forest. (That is, unless an odd bug causes the object not to appear at all, forcing a complete reinstall to possibly fix the issue.)
This gameplay loop repeats multiple times in the same fashion as, one by one, you uncover the fates of Larry, Sara and Todd, three individuals who have fallen victim to the mystery of these woods under different circumstances. Each assumes the narrator role in their respective part of the forest, and as you delve deeper they’ll fill you in on their stories through fully voiced, well-performed monologues. The otherwise idyllic walk provides time to listen to each person’s tale, followed by the remembrance vision mode at the end of each path to reveal their ultimate fate. What ties Larry, Sara and Todd together appears to be you; even though you may not remember them, they know you and the game’s hidden objective becomes figuring out what role you actually play in this mystery.
The Fabled Woods is not only highly linear but also very easy to complete in a single sitting. At first I was a bit disappointed at how fast I reached the ending; multiple character stories wrapping up in only an hour or so seemed quite rushed and never did provide any overt answers. But for the most part I think that stretching things out further might have just resulted in extra padding, and there are certainly enough clues to get a general idea of what’s going on.
The one big miss is the treatment of a potential unsettling subplot hinted at early on. During his section, Larry talks about sensing a malignant creature in the woods, watching and stalking him, hunting its prey. Imagery of large steel cages (too large for any mere wolf) and newspaper clippings about others disappearing in the woods set up what could have been an interesting horror twist. Sadly, very little is done to capitalize on this, with only a few vague hints near the end possibly linking back to it. Instead, the game comes to a sudden, rather unsatisfying finale that looks at first glance like you’re given some manner of choice in the outcome but actually ends up being just as linear as the rest of the game.
Given all of its limitations, The Fabled Woods seems like more of a concept – albeit a sound one – than a fully fleshed-out adventure. Though it’s presented well while it lasts, with pretty visuals, solid voice acting and a decent soundtrack, it’s too short to make the most of the narrative ideas it establishes. The bigger offender, however, is the passive nature of its environments, which are far too hands-off and barren even for a game in this particular subgenre. The ideas are here from which to construct an intriguing story-driven exploratory experience, and I’d be interested to see what the development team could accomplish with an expanded scope. As it stands, unfortunately, The Fabled Woods is almost all woods and not nearly enough fable.
