The First Tree

This game is a journey with the narrators, and a clearly personal story. It's not for everyone; it's more of a narrated interactive journey than a "game". I enjoyed taking my time to check out all the nooks and crannies, and listening to the beautiful music and voice overs. It's arguably a short game, but I felt it tug at my emotional strings so hard that it was the perfect length. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I'm into walking simulators and can even accept if they are linear or short or technically sub standard - just not at the same time. And this is my main gripe with "The First Tree". While the dialog between the speaker and his wife revolving around memories of his father is well written and performed and actually creates a mood of sadness and loss, this is about all what the game actually offers. The connection to the fox searching for her whelps feels somehow random. Admittedly, I was mainly attracted to this game by its graphics which was also one of the biggest disappointments. While the cell shaded fox looks great, the levels seem to be somewhat carelessly designed with some terrain tool and filled with default props. Specifically the first area with its winter scenery looks bland due to automatically generated mountains, bad snow shader and tawdry colors. Later areas look much better due to grass and trees but the grass disappears much too early and the trees look all the same. Still in the later areas, the game looks kinda nice, sometimes even beautiful. Anyway, the much bigger issue are the animations. The walking/running animation is a fixed loop and always feels like the fox was hovering above the ground. When moving sideways, the fox just turns by 45° which looks and feels absolutely horrible. Even worse, you need to do double jump which is just silly in this kind of game and looks worse than it sounds. In a nutshell, all the mood created by the voice acting is kinda destroyed by the animations. Anyway, the "game" part consists of running through mid-size areas collecting stars and searching for light columns where the fox digs up a childhood memory of the speaker which triggers another short dialog. At a few points you need to collect butterflies to do super-silly butterfly-double-jumps which is like the zenith of silliness. And that's about it. It took me less than 2h to finish and I collected all story parts and most of the stars.

My daughter being addicted to foxes at the moment, I bought this game on sale. Story: rather typical "I didn't spend enouch time with my dad while he was living" type of story Music: relaxing but nothing to write home about Gameplay: What gameplay? You run around, click to dig up old toys and can double jump over cliffs. Graphics: pleasing but nothing extraordinary to look at But you play as a fox. My kid loves it and I can just relax looking at a fox stroll around, which can be better then playing "snakes and ladders" once in a while. Admitedly, I didn't finish it as at some point you're not a fox anymore and didn't manage to catch the riddle since my kid is always talking which might be linked to "not being a fox anymore". But yeah, you're a fox.

The pacing is very slow, which is troubling considering it's not a long game to begin with. The fox's movement is odd and has a tendency to look like it's just sliding along the ground, made worse by the fact that you can move much faster by using both "W" and "A" or "D" at the same time. The voice over recording quality is pretty poor and sounds like it was done using a mic on some "gaming" headset, including peeking and plenty of breathy whistling that could have been solved just by using a pop filter. As far as the story is concerned, it's main purpose seems to serve as a lesson of what to avoid doing when writing dialog between two people.