Forest Grove Review (Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch & PC)

Having traipsed an indescribable amount of corridors and solved just enough mysteries to make even the likes of Hercule Poirot quiver in awe, I liked to believe that Blowfish Studios‘ Forest Grove wouldn’t have been too much of an obstacle to cartwheel over. On paper, at least, it didn’t sound overly demanding: the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur had gone missing, and a vacant home just so happened to shroud the clues that pointed to her general whereabouts. In my eyes, it was Gone Home, but with fewer letters between star-crossed lovers, and more CSI-obsessed reconstructions and all-round malicious activities to sift through. That, to me, at least, was Forest Grove, in a nutshell.

Forest Grove, in case you happened to miss out on its debut, is a first-person detective game—a relatively short romp through a futuristic world that just so happens to be the staging grounds for a curious case about a missing girl, and a wealthy tech guru who also happens to be the victim’s father. Surprise surprise, it’s you who has to knuckle in on the clues and figure out what happened here, as well as divide the facts from the fiction while rooting through artifact after artifact. Suffice to say, Hercule Poirot would’ve had an absolute field day with this one.

It’s been a good few hours since I first entered the corridors of that particular crime scene, and so, while it’s all still relatively fresh in my mind, I ought to chalk up a verse or two to describe the case file. The question that hangs over all, really, is simple: was it worth the trek, or was it hardly worth suiting up for? Let’s dive right in.

The Future’s Dilemma

To put you in the picture, Forest Grove takes place fifty years in the future, in an almost cyberpunk-type world that blends rich Victorian aesthetics with a CSI-like nano-tech blueprint. As a newly recruited investigator of the aptly titled Remote Forensics Branch, you must harness the power of an advanced tool that grants you the ability to reconstruct former events, and scrub through a home in search of clues that point to a missing girl’s whereabouts. It’s all very Heavy Rain, in certain ways, as the bulk of the gameplay either revolves around examining clues or webbing certain components together to craft a plausible outcome. The only difference here is, well, you won’t be suffering from any side effects as a result of extended use of the AI tech. Phew.

The goal in Forest Grove is all rather simple: maneuver from room to room in a vacant manor, and build a case that helps solve the disappearance of a girl named Zooey. There are several suspects to consider along the way, although, unlike a lot of detective IPs, you won’t ever need to interrogate them, per se, but rather keep them in mind for the theatrical conclusion, at which point you’ll present your evidence and set the record straight. As it is indeed a detective game at heart, however, you’ll have to learn how to connect the dots yourself—a task that, unsurprisingly, the game doesn’t actually ever attempt to assist you with. But who cares, right? After all, it is in the job description.

To summarize, there’s a missing girl—the daughter of a wealthy tech innovator, and a vacant home that’s rife with traces of DNA and former memories. Your goal: utilize the tech that said innovator created, and have it decipher the whereabouts of his long-lost child.

You’re on Your Own, Kid

Despite the game making next to no effort to support your newly appointed career, the actual duties of said career aren’t all that difficult to wrap your noggin’ around. For the most part, it’s merely the case of examining an item, giving it the once-over, and then feeling all the wiser once said item slots into the overarching reconstruction bubble. It’s like that for the whole of the story, which means that once you’ve essentially mastered the first room, the rest of them sort of follow suit and unravel between your fingertips until all but one remains.

Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the concept of working between rooms and developing my network of evidence and potential suspects. Having said that, I did miss the social aspect—the camaraderie between folks and witnesses and what have you. And while a great portion of the game is fully voiced, there was still a lot left to be desired, and not to mention a helping hand to alleviate that looming sense of being isolated with little more than a motive and an empty case file.

Of course, once the cogs eventually maneuvered into alignment and the option to witness the reconstruction came knocking, those concerns soon took flight and left me feeling completely immersed — so much that I wanted to press on and locate the next link in the chain. During those frequent moments of silence, however, I can’t say I was operating on an identical wavelength, as I was either desperately trying to hop back on and ride out cloud nine, or reluctantly traveling back and forth to locations I had already plucked clean several times over.

The Beauty of AI

There is one thing that I did find fascinating in Forest Grove, and that was the tech—the nifty gadgets and gizmos that, while in short supply, gave me reason to believe that I was, in fact, a citizen of a nano-focused future. From the goggles that allowed me to cross-examine traces of DNA, to the technology that granted me access to a wealth of cyber knowledge — each tool had a purpose, and I honestly enjoyed taking full advantage of each of their capabilities as I tiptoed through the remnants of the crags and crevices of the multimillionaire’s manor.

Sure enough, the advanced nano-tech is a boon in itself, but what lets Forest Grove down, really, is its lack of depth. To put it bluntly, there aren’t a whole lot of twists and turns to onboard throughout your on-site investigation, nor are there any unexpected arrivals or dramatic displays to shake up the scenario, either. Instead, you’re more or less given the tools to solve a relatively easy and somewhat predictable riddle, and then asked to provide your consensus on the matter before shoving the suspect behind bars. And that’s it. There aren’t any Michael Bay-esque cutscenes, nor are there any post-credits teasers that signal the dawning of a new chapter — or anything like that. Simply put, there’s a newspaper headline, and a short passage outlining the details of the open-and-shut case. Nothing particularly exciting there, then.

All in all, Forest Grove can be swept under the rug in two hours or less. That is, of course, provided you spend a good amount of time carefully weaving each piece of the puzzle together and combing over every clue and passage of dialogue. For this reason alone, I can’t help but feel as if there should’ve been more to explore.

Verdict

Forest Grove doesn’t exactly win our favor as a story–driven adventure, but it does, on the other hand, deliver enough to be seen as a genuinely solid detective game. And while its story is, to an extent, predictable, it does summon just enough to make such a lackluster narrative surprisingly enjoyable. But of course, that isn’t to say that it’s enough to write home about; the lack of dialogue and camaraderie spoils an otherwise relatively entertaining CSI-like experience. The point is, it could’ve incorporated so much more into the mix, but instead, it opted for fewer components, and therefore failed to paint the entire portrait.

In my mind, Forest Grove is several cases short of being a complete product. That isn’t to say the single story that it does have isn’t any good — because it is. However, with the amount of tech that the standalone stint brought to the table, it almost felt wasteful, seeing it thrown aside after a couple of short hours. To me, at least, it felt as if the case surrounding Zooey was only the first chapter in a much, much larger book of short stories. Suffice to say, it was a one-and-done ordeal — a fact that I, and no doubt countless others, will feel a tad shortchanged over.

When all’s said and done, you could certainly do a whole lot worse than Forest Grove — especially if you’re desperate to tread the waters of a new and uninhabited crime scene with all the tech and AI-infused gadgets, to boot. Is it going to leave you on the edge of your seat as you peel away each corner of the picture? Probably not. For what it’s worth, though, it’ll definitely tease you enough to make you crave a second, and perhaps even a third inning.