I've always wondered how I'd fare in a survival situation. Lost in the woods, with no food or water, how long would I last? Would I make good choices? Could I find my way back to safety?
The answers to those questions are almost certainly "Not long, no, and definitely not," and hopefully I'll never have to actually find out. In the meantime, I try to live out my survival fantasies through films and games, and Wordless Forest, which launched on Steam today, is sorta both.
Wordless Forest is an FMV survival game solo developer Dogus Cagrici shot while hiking in the "dense forests and wilderness of four different cities across Turkey for 40 days." It's completely dialogue-free (hence the title) as the character Cagrici plays finds himself alone in the wilds, trying to find his way to safety and put his scrambled memories back together after a head injury.
As the survivor attempts to make his way to a distant firewatch tower, you'll have to make choices for him. There's some food at an abandoned campsite that may be unsafe to eat: should you risk it? A dark cave might present some shelter but also be hiding danger: should you check it out? And maybe most importantly, your dog is missing: should you follow its footprints deeper into the wilderness, or focus on getting yourself to safety? The choices are presented on-screen as an either/or option, and clicking one will advance the story in that direction.
I see the early reviews on Steam are mixed, and I'm not that surprised. I played through Wordless Forest this morning, and it's not the most interactive adventure, really: over about 45 minutes of my runthrough there weren't a huge amount of choices to make, and I can imagine some players might find more of a short interactive movie than a game.
But despite the short running time and lean interactivity, I still found it pretty compelling. It's well-filmed, especially considering Cagrici did seemingly everything himself, including clambering up cliffs, crawling into caves, and even eating raw fish. You think a lot of survival game devs would subject themselves to that?
Most of all, I appreciate stories that can be told with minimal dialogue, especially survival stories. All Is Lost, the Robert Redford film about a man trying to survive at sea after his boat is damaged, is done with nearly no dialogue, and the best parts of Cast Away are done in near-silence, too.
I like that approach to storytelling. It's the extreme of the "show, don't tell" rule, and Wordless Forest does a good job pulling it off. You'll find it here on Steam, where it's 10% off for the next two weeks.
