Wakefield Interactive
PC and Xbox Series S/X
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THE opening of The Forest Cathedral is one of the most arresting I have seen in a video game. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there.
When I first came across this game, an adaptation of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson鈥檚 massively influential book, it seemed to have been designed with 麻豆传媒 readers in mind. Carson was a biologist and conservationist who discovered that the pesticide DDT, intended to kill mosquitoes and other disease-spreading insects, could harm animals higher up the food chain. Her exposure of the problem helped spark an ecological movement that led to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Such video game adaptations of books are rare, and of non-fiction ones even rarer, so I was intrigued to see how The Forest Cathedral would work. The answer is, it doesn鈥檛.
Let me back up. The game opens with you controlling a ladybird flying through a forest, as both menacing music and an ominous whooshing sound grow in volume, until the ladybird lands on a branch and dies in a fog of DDT. You then briefly play as the person spraying this chemical, until eventually Carson is introduced. She is hired by Paul Hermann M眉ller, the real-life discoverer of DDT鈥檚 insecticidal properties, to study an island where it is being used. This is entirely fictional; the two never met. The dialogue is oddly stilted, almost like something out of a David Lynch movie, but it is hard to know if this is an artistic choice.
At this point, we are introduced to the Little Man, one of the most bizarre elements of the game. Despite it being set in the early 1960s, when a single computer could still fill an entire room, all of the equipment on the island is computer-controlled and you manipulate it by manoeuvring a small figure, the Little Man, through a 2D Super Mario-esque video game-within-the-game that is played on monitors dotted around the forest.
At this point I should admit that I haven鈥檛 actually read Silent Spring, but I can hazard a guess that it didn鈥檛 involve Carson playing what may be one of the worst platforming games ever created. The Little Man is horrible to control, all the levels are incredibly frustrating and I spent every single minute cursing his existence. I can only think that developer Wakefield Interactive felt the need to put more 鈥済ame鈥� in its game, since your time as Carson is mostly spent walking from A to B, but it is a serious mistake. The Forest Cathedral only takes about an hour to play, but it felt much, much longer.
In the game鈥檚 favour, it does do a good job of explaining how Carson realised that small amounts of DDT in the lower echelons of the food chain could bioaccumulate, reaching larger doses in predators like rainbow trout or eagles, both of which we see die in the game, and potentially threaten people. You don鈥檛 experience this via game mechanics, however, making me wonder what the point of adapting the book was.
To be fair to Wakefield, it is clear this is a game made by a small team on an even smaller budget, and, given that, there is only so much that could have been done.
To that end, I applaud the ambition in adapting Silent Spring, and would certainly like to see more developers looking to books for inspiration, but it is hard to recommend that anyone actually play The Forest Cathedral.
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