The Fabled Woods

I'm not going to lie, there are times when I'm jealous of movie critics. When they sit down to watch a film, not only do they know how long it's going to be, but they also never have to worry about the movie working. Those are not things I can take for granted as a game critic, which is something I was reminded of this week when I tried to play through The Fabled Woods from first-time developer CyberPunch Studios. What should have been a short and sweet first-person narrative thriller turned into a long process of just trying to get the game to work properly. In fact, when all was said and done, it ended up taking me three times as long to get the game running as it did to play through the thing. I bet that's not a problem that Siskel and Ebert had to deal with.

From the moment we step foot in the fabled woods, it's obvious that this is not going to be one of those relaxing strolls through the forest. The sun is out, the birds are chirping and you can almost feel the wind as it blows through the trees, yet something is definitely off. Our first sign of this is an empty campsite near the lake, which appears to be freshly abandoned. This is made all the more urgent when you notice the blood on the tent and the unnatural markings leading down to the nearby creek. Clearly, something bad happened here. But what? The answer to that question lies in our short but eventful trek through these fabled woods.

This is the kind of first-person narrative game where you spend a lot of time listening to other characters talk at you. We're first introduced to Larry, an old man who is tormented by the tragic death of a loved one. Sara, on the other hand, is an investigator on the hunt for evidence that could help solve an important case. Much like Larry, she too is haunted by something that happened in this forest. These stories, as well as one about a scientist named Todd, help to fill in the blanks and answer all those questions you probably had back at the campsite.

I know that there are a lot of people who dismiss this story-based genre out-of-hand and disparagingly call them "walking simulators." I can respect that and even understand where those people are coming from, but I've always enjoyed these narrative games. I'm a sucker for a compelling story, especially when it's a crime thriller or supernatural horror. And at the start of The Fabled Woods, it looked like it would check off a lot of those boxes. However, as I adventured deeper into the forest, I found myself thoroughly underwhelmed at every turn.

A lot of the problems can be placed at the feet of the structure, which is repetitious to a fault. There aren't any puzzles to solve here, so you're mostly just looking for the item or weapon that will advance the story. Once you've found the proper clue, you'll be whisked away to a weird dimension where you follow a very narrow path while everything else floats in the air. Once you reach the end of that path, you'll go back to the forest where you'll look for the next item, where you'll once again go back to this hellish dimension. This is how the game goes right up to the very end.

And speaking of which, the game's two endings could not possibly be more anticlimactic. In fact, the entire third act had me rolling my eyes. It's not just the fact that the story is in a hurry to end, but also that the conclusion is so painfully obvious that you'll be able to guess the big twist ending within the opening seconds. What's worse is that the game ultimately has nothing to say. It's a retread of a lot of familiar horror and thriller tropes, none of which are particularly interesting or handled well here. We get a very straight-forward story that is so paper-thin that it barely has enough momentum to fill up the 30-minute run time.

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There's also the more troubling part of The Fabled Woods, which is that this game barely works. I instantly ran into two game-breaking problems that made it impossible to play through the earliest parts of the story. The first was right after the campsite we talked about earlier, where I couldn't even cross a bridge without hitting an invisible wall. I assumed that this was because I was missing part of the story or needed to find the right item, but I was wrong. The game was just putting up an invisible wall that prevented me from getting to the next part of the journey.

The second game-breaking bug came when I decided to start over. You would think that I would have no problem getting back to where I was, since I had already investigated the campsite and knew what I was looking for. Smooth sailing, right? Wrong! I couldn't even find the first item to collect because it failed to spawn in the world. I tried starting over, loading saved games, fiddling with the settings and anything else I could think of, but the thing I needed to advance the story never showed up. Once again, I was stuck. Thankfully, after an hour and a half of getting absolutely nowhere, I ended up uninstalling the game and redownloading it. This worked and allowed me to play through the whole game in a single sitting. It took me 90 minutes of fighting the game in order to play through the 30-minute story. Not cool.

I would also point out that the game is poorly optimized. No matter what settings you choose, the game never runs as smoothly as you would want. The animation sputters around and the textures annoyingly pop-up, which takes away from what promises to be a beautiful game. Then again, this is pretty low on my list of complaints about The Fabled Woods. Compared to the lackluster plot and game-breaking bugs, I can put up with unstable frame-rates and a few ugly textures. Hell, if the story is compelling enough, I've been known to put up with a whole lot worse. But with a twist you can see coming a mile away and questionable voice acting, I have a hunch that the only thing I'm going to remember about this trek through the forest will be the frustrating technical problems and laughably unsatisfying endings.