A Game About Exploration
By Leo Nickerson
Among Trees was a game undiscovered by the exploration community due to its classification as an Indie game. 3-5 people designed and edited the game at FJRD Interactive, located in the Swedish wilderness. This game, when launched on the Epic Games store on June 13 2020 was thrown in with all the other Indie survival games despite having key differences.
It had no story to follow and no real direction or plot. It is only you and your cabin in the middle of the woods. Among Trees was always intended to be a game that incorporated zen elements; the only dangers are the bears and wolves, and they do not actively pursue you or taunt you like in other Indie survival games like
The Long Dark and The Forest. They merely exist to create a sense of danger when entering those areas. The mechanics are basic and easy to understand. There are no production lines or fabricators and there are no lithium nitrate combinations, it’s just very basic crafting recipes that need small amounts of supplies to make sure you don’t get stuck trying to make one item that progresses the story. All of the mechanics are slowly introduced, with specific rooms designated for specific purposes so you unlock their function as you build the house. The game’s main goal (if you could call it that) is building the house itself. As you create more and more rooms the recipes become just a little bit more complicated, inviting you to explore. Exploration is the key mechanic in the game, and the fluid graphics show that it is an exploration game based on the art style alone. The mechanics just feel right for the game, you don’t come into a town and have to talk to one specific person or go and kill 30 goblins, you merely go further and further into the forest, admiring the landscape and finding broken power lines and buildings along the way. With the world being so big the structures are far and few between. Coming across one feels like a small achievement in its own right. You can find these structures in every environment, from the dense forests to the wet swamps.
top left: The cabin that you stumble across in the woods. This is where your story in Among Trees begins and ends. bottom left: One of the lakes you come across in-game. It bustles with life and is close to your cabin.
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photos courtesy of the Among Trees media page
All of these things are amazing in every way, letting the player go at their own pace, but some issues do occur when trying to play the game. You need to have a powerful pc for the game to show better graphics, and even on the lowest settings you still need a good pc to make it run above 20 FPS. There is also the problem of saving game progress. Among Trees has no autosave feature and that makes playing the game hard for people just getting into gaming or the exploration genre. There are no apparent bugs other than the occasional ai malfunction, such as trying to run smashing the character’s heads into a wall, or clipping through trees, but those are minor and don’t impact the game very much. Overall this game is simple and sweet. It’s the best way to join gaming or join the exploration genre of games. Everything is simple and easy to understand, making it easy to grasp hold of. Even with some of the issues it is most definitely worth the 15 USD price tag that comes with it.
