Video Game / The Forest

Remember to kick back, relax, and enjoy your flight.

A JEALOUS GOD PUNISHES A PARENT'S FAULT ON THEIR CHILDREN

— The Red Man

On your way back from a trip to New York, your plane crashes in an uncharted wilderness. Your son, Timmy, is taken by a mysterious man covered in red paint. Your fellow passengers are gone, and as the possibly sole survivor of the wreck, it's now your job to survive on your own and find your son, by any means necessary. But the local cannibal tribes won't make it easy on you, and they're not the only horrors out for your blood...

Developed by the four-person team at Endnight Games, The Forest was first announced back in May 2013, and opened to Early Access on Steam a year later. As of April 2018, it has reached full release. Gameplay is a mixture of the Survival Sandbox and Survival Horror genres, with the challenge being to juggle resource gathering and protection from the local cannibal population.

Beginning in late May, the game also received a patch to give it Virtual Reality support. The VR version of the game, naturally, features updated controls for the motion controllers, such as being able to more freely aim your bow, throw weapons, point lights, and chop trees. The VR version is still in beta, however it is being updated and patched regularly.

A PS4 port was announced in December 2014. It was finally released on November 6th, 2018.

A sequel, Sons of the Forest, opened to Early Access on Steam on February 23rd, 2023 and fully released February 22, 2024.

---

Examples you'll encounter in The Forest:

• Abandoned Camp Ruins: There are plenty of abandoned camps in the game. They're stocked with items you can take, a fire you can cook meat with and warm up at, and sleeping bags you can sleep and save in.
• Abusive Precursors: The ancient beings who built the obelisks. Whoever they were, they had the power to resurrect the dead as Humanoid Abominations and seemed to have a thing for blood sacrifice.
• Aerosol Flamethrower: Cans of hairspray liberated from lost luggage from the plane can be combined with the player character's lighter for an improvised flamethrower to set things alight. However, its range is quite short, area of effect small, and damage absolutely minimal, which is about what you can expect from trying this.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Most of the longer cave systems have firepits and rivers with fish, so you're less likely to starve or freeze to death if you forgot to pack enough provisions. Some of them even have save points in the form of abandoned tents.
  • Rocks respawn pretty much the moment you turn your back, so you don't need to strip-mine half the island if you're trying to construct a rock wall.
  • While climbing a rope consumes stamina, running out of stamina while on the rope won't bar you from continuing to climb. Given how long the average rope is, this is a godsend.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • You know how that patrol has been just watching you from the woods for the past couple days, then leaving? Today they attack because you've started to ignore them, and they know your routine.
  • Chased a lone cannibal into the woods? Say hello to his three friends that just circled around behind you while he runs off to get reinforcements.
  • Sometimes several cannibals will lie hidden in wait around a well-trafficked spot (i.e. one that they've observed the player/players repeatedly pass through), waiting for the player character to wander into the middle of them, then a leader will yell a war cry and they all jump out at once to encircle them.
  • The natives are divided into different groups, so emaciated and desperate cannibals will behave differently from the organized tribals. In fact, the tribals may simply keep watch over you without attacking if you're careful not to hurt them and you stay out of their marked territory, and if it does come to violence, it's possible to completely cow them into submission if you use explosives.
• Artifact of Doom: Whatever they found that gave Sahara Therapeutics the power to bring back the dead has a rather nasty side effect of turning them into warped monsters.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Cannibal chieftains are a lot tougher than regular ones, being able to take a lot more hits and dealing much more damage with their own attacks as well.
• Bald of Evil: Male cannibals don't have any hair. Some females also lack hair.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy:
  • Some male cannibals walk around without loincloths and have a totally smooth crotch. The implication is this is part of the mutations. The human corpses in the mass grave are nude and anatomically correct.
  • Zigzagged with the topless female cannibals, whose nipples are clearly visible. Lady cannibals who spawn without loincloths, however, reveal they're lacking some parts below the belt too.
• Berserk Button: Killing a female cannibal will drive all nearby males into a killing frenzy.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • In the canon ending, Eric shoots down another plane, then kidnaps and sacrifices someone else's child to save Timmy. The epilogue confirms that Timmy survives into adulthood, though he's starting to experience seizures that could herald his transformation into a monster.
  • In the alternate ending, Eric can accept Timmy's death and shut down the second obelisk rather than use it. Timmy may be dead for good, but at least Eric can live without having the act of bringing down another plane and sacrificing another child on his conscience.
• Blackout Basement: The caves, particularly after the game left early access, are almost completely without light. Occasionally there will be some faint bio-luminescent lichen hanging from the ceiling or a few skull lanterns scattered about, but for the most the player will need to navigate by what light they brought with them. This could be a crafted torch, a Ten-Second Flashlight if they are lucky, but often they will just have to hold a lighter in one hand, especially if they need to hold a weapon with the other, making even a minor encounter tense with the visibility so restricted.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: You can wear up to 10 segments of armor to absorb damage instead of directly taking damage to your health. You can use lizard skin (weakest protection), bone armor (good protection), or mutant skin/creepy armor (heavy protection).
• Body Horror:
  • The Octopus and Spider mutants, dubbed Armsy and Virginia, which have multiple limbs. Especially creepy since each one appears to be made of several conjoined bodies.
  • In the Sahara facility, there are glass-fronted observation chambers, mostly filled with the mutated corpses of test subjects. One of the rooms, however, is almost completely filled with an enormous mass of dead flesh covered with eyes and limbs. Whatever happened to that subject must not have been pretty.
  • What happens to Megan Cross and later Timmy. Being the game's Final Boss, the former twists into a monster that resembles tree limbs.
• Border Patrol:
  • The peninsula in which the game takes place is bordered on 3 sides by shark-infested ocean, and on the North by impassible, snow-covered mountains.
  • If the player tries to evade the sharks on water by using any kind of raft, traveling too far from shore will cause the player character to stop paddling, pull out their torn photo of Timmy, then put it away and paddle the raft back a little toward shore.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • An easy way to survive early on is to simply set your walls up to where the only way a Cannibal can enter is through a campfire or firepit, then watch them light on fire as they charge at you. This works well until they start attacking your walls. Also by making your camp small and out of the way, like on the cliff overlooking the abandoned yacht. It's away from native patrols, and if you make your camp small and are careful not to be followed back home, it's pretty much completely ignored.
  • There's an area fans have dubbed the Fertile Lands (which coincidentally you will always be able to find on your first day as following the direction of the sun on day 1 always leads there) where the cannibals never show up unless you start hunting them, you can build a large base that they'll never notice because it's far outside of patrol routes, and is filled to the brim with trees, berries, and meat.
  • As many players discover, the default axe is a bit weak but it's sturdy, right there when you start, and a Jack of All Trades weapon and tool.
  • The aerosol flamethrower is a pretty awful weapon, but it turns out it's amazing in short bursts for burning down corpses for bones if you don't want to build a fire.
• Boss Rush: When entering the sinkhole, you have to fight three pairs of powerful mutant cannibals in sequential encounters.
• Bottomless Bladder: There are fatigue, hunger, health, and temperature meters, but no need to relieve yourself.
• Brats with Slingshots: A classic Y-shaped slingshot is a craftable weapon, though much like in real life it does almost no practical damage, making it mostly useful for launching a distraction or getting an enemy's attention. However, it is more useful for hunting small game, like squirrels and birds, where it is more accurate than a thrown spear and is less resource-intensive than a bow.
• Cannibal Tribe: The primary antagonists of the game.
• Celebrity Survivor: You learn from background details and collectibles that your character is a celebrity survivalist named Eric Leblanc.
• Came Back Wrong: Megan. After being revived by the obelisk, she still looks like a corpse; she has blue skin and the nasty back wound that killed her still there. She murders her father by sticking crayons in his eyes in an Ax-Crazy moment, and then she sprouts loads of tentacles and twisted legs out of her mouth and goes on a killing rampage. It's likely the same fate will befall Timmy.
• Challenge Run: The Vegan achievement requires you to beat the game without killing or eating any animals. This locks you out of all the inventory upgrades and a few key crafting options (fur boots, warm suit), since you need animal skins to make those things. It also eliminates your main source of food, requiring you to subsist on mushrooms, berries, and snacks. The Pacifist achievement is a mini-Challenge Run; all you have to do is avoid killing any cannibals for 10 days, which can be done pretty easily if you know where to set up shop and don't draw attention to yourself.
• Chased by Angry Natives: The natives are rather territorial and will take umbrage at the player character trespassing in their forest. Early in the game, this will just consist of yelling angrily and trying to scare the player off by feigning attacks, only escalating to actually attacking if the player sticks around. However, as time goes on and the player takes actions that further antagonize them (chopping down trees, building large or defensive structures, raiding their villages for supplies, and obviously attacking any of them) their "deterrence" gets more aggressive, including springing ambushes that the player is going to need to run from to keep from being overwhelmed.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The "finale" of the game, starting from the entrance to the Sahara facility, takes a good hour or so to complete, with no save points in between and no ability to build temporary shelters.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: The achievement for building a gazebo is called "You Should Be Looking For Timmy".
• Covered in Mud: Being covered in mud decreases the chances of being spotted by cannibals, however the camouflage can be washed away by rain.
• Crossdresser: The player can take the stewardess' outfit and wear it, though the outfit is clearly ill-fitting with the jacket's buttons barely holding up due to the player's belly.
• Deadly Euphemism: Oddly enough, the name for a certain trap was changed within the first day of Early Access. Of course, this example isn't about the old name but the new one: the "Happy Birthday" trap... yeah. It gives you quite the surprise.
• Degraded Boss: After the 1.10 patch, a mutant identical to the game's Final Boss can appear on the surface after you beat the game and choose the Endless Game ending. Besides being a lot tougher than even the regular special mutants, it also spawns the game's Optional Boss when killed.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The Flintlock pistol. While it's slow to fire, inaccurate at long ranges, and its ammo is rare (unless you exploit Game Breaking Bugs), it will One-Hit Kill the smaller enemies, 2-3 hit kill the advanced enemies, and will quickly put down boss level enemies in 5-8 shots. While hints to its location are scattered throughout the game in old pictures, it's entirely possible for an experienced player (or one who has read the wiki) to immediately go to the caches containing its parts and assemble it at the start of the game.
  • The upgraded spear is one of the best melee weapons in the game, and it can be crafted early on without the need to go exploring the caves (unlike the katana). It can't block attacks, but has good damage, high attack speed, and low stamina drain, making it great for hit-stunning cannibals to death. Its forward attack stab also makes it better in tight spaces than the wide swings of most other melee weapons.
  • The katana is another high-end melee weapon than can be acquired early on if you know where to look for it; you do have to go into the caves to get it, but if you know the correct cave entrance and path you can get it quickly without even having to fight any cannibals.
• Dual Boss: Just before entering the sinkhole, you have to fight a pair of Virginias and a pair of Armsys in back-to-back encounters. Immediately afterwards you fight a pair of Cowmen in the Sinkhole itself before proceeding to the endgame area.
• Elite Mooks: Pale cannibals and mutants are significantly tougher than the regular versions; they tend to show up more often the more you piss off the cannibals, and also have a significant presence in the endgame areas.
• Eyeless Face: The "Cowman" mutants have malformed faces with empty eye sockets covered with skin... but it doesn't stop them from finding you. The mutant babies have the same problem.
• Fan Disservice: The female cannibals are topless. They're also filthy, emaciated, and homicidal.
• Fetus Terrible: Malformed, still-living babies can be found in several caves.
• Fission Mailed: If you get killed by the cannibals for the first time in a new game session, you won't get a game over. You'll wake up in a cave littered with dead passengers, with a good amount of loot. Sadly, dying at any point after this (even if you're still in the cave) and it's a game over. This can be sidestepped by exiting and restarting the game as now it counts as a new session.
• Final Boss: Megan Cross, a little girl turned mutant.
• Flare Gun: Can be used to set both animals and cannibals on fire.
• Fluffy the Terrible: The octopus and spider mutants are referred to as Armsy and Virginia by the notes and fans.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Some male cannibals fight naked, and female cannibals fight topless.
• Gang Up on the Human: Predators (crocodiles) and cannibals will ignore each other completely and focus solely on attacking you.
• Ghibli Hills: The peninsula on which you're stranded is every bit as beautiful as it is dangerous.
  Markiplier: Sometimes I forget that this is a horror game, and then it becomes a horror game very quickly.
• Gotta Catch Them All: There is a counter which increases each time you find the corpse of another passenger.
• Green Hill Zone: The "Fertile Lands", a lush and hilly biome on the eastern side of the peninsula. It's resource-rich and mostly (though not entirely) devoid of cannibals, making it a great spot for a base.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: You can use a cannibal's severed limb as a weapon. They also can be used to create effigies that can scare away the cannibals. You can also make Head Bombs, which are exactly what they sound like.
• Human Resources:
  • Using cannibal body parts to build effigies keeps them away, showing that you can take them on. Or it can do the opposite and attract more. (It's also not clear whether the cannibals still qualify as "human".)
  • Burning cannibal bodies is essentially the only reliable source of bone, which is important for crafting some of the better quality weapons and equipment.
  • If you draw enough attention to your base and butcher enough cannibals, said cannibals will start putting up effigies in front of your base themselves. It's probably best to get rid of them, though, because besides being unsightly, they also generally tend to draw more cannibals and even mutants in greater numbers.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • The Octopus (Armsy) and The Spider (Virginia) are weird... human-things. The game's wiki describes them as two or more people put together with a good dosage of extra limbs... There's a reason the wiki refers to them, and the cannibals, as mutants.
  • The dead creatures in the secret lab, as well as the Final Boss, are straight-out Lovecraftian horrors.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Eating some mushrooms make you recover health and energy, but for a very low amount.
• I Choose to Stay: In the v1.00 full release of the game, if you follow the alternate ending path and shut down the weapon instead of using it to shoot down another passenger plane, your character will mourn Timmy and opt to remain on the peninsula; all your mission objectives are crossed out and the game becomes an Endless Game.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The cannibals got the name for a reason, and that reason is that they eat people. You too if you chop up their bodies and cook and eat their body parts (which is also a very fast way to go insane).
• Improvised Armour: Your armour is increased by wearing layers of lizards' skin, or bones tied together with cloth.
• Infinite Flashlight:
  • The lighter. It emits a very short-ranged light and must be lit several times per minute, but doesn't run out of gas.
  • A lit Molotov cocktail being held is an infinite source of light, too. They actually emit more light than the lighter.
  • The rebreather gear has an infinite flashlight attached to it, but it automatically shuts off after a few seconds whenever you're not underwater.
  • All lamps made with skulls never have to be re-lit, but provide less light than the more basic types and can't set enemies on fire.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The flintlock pistol. There's only one in the game and you need to find 8 pieces scattered around the map to build it, but it's very powerful, being a firearm.
• Item Crafting: With the ease of the survival book, you just need to gather the resources needed to craft a weapon, a nice house, or a trap.
• Katanas Are Just Better: There's one somewhere on the peninsula, of course. Specifically, in one of the caves. At one point it was an Infinity +1 Sword, but as development marches on it's been demoted to Disk One Nuke. Downplayed in that even at its strongest, this status is less about being a katana specifically, and more about your other early-to-midgame options being things like sharpened sticks and a tiny survival hatchet.
• Kill It with Fire: You can use bottles of alcohol to create incendiary weapons like flaming arrows or flaming spears. They're pretty powerful (2-3 will kill a cannibal while several will kill the larger mutants) and have the added benefit of providing light in dark areas. You can also create Molotov cocktails.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: The v1.0 full release of the game adds a second ending in which instead of shooting down another plane, you can instead shut off the weapon artifact and descend to the core to remove its power source, thus assuring that no more planes will fall victim to it. Your character then mourns Timmy and opts to remain on the peninsula.
• Loincloth: Worn by some of the cannibals. The rest are running around completely naked (though they have Barbie Doll Anatomy).
• Love Makes You Evil: In the canon ending, Eric shoots down a second airliner and kills hundreds of people in order to find a child he can feed to the Artifact of Doom to resurrect Timmy.
• Ludicrous Gibs:
  • From what we see, the cannibals are quite messy eaters. There are entire caves filled with viscera.
  • Using dynamite or other explosives against cannibals or Creepy Mutants has predictably gruesome results.
• MacGyvering: It is possible to create a bomb by combining a circuit board, a wristwatch, a few coins, and some booze together.
• Machete Mayhem: A machete can be found at the bottom of the sinkhole. It's a pretty good melee weapon and about on par with the katana. However, the fact you only get it just before entering The Very Definitely Final Dungeon does limit its usefulness, unlike the katana which you can get pretty early on if you know where it is.
• Mirror Character: Dr. Mathew Cross and the protagonist are both working to save a loved one, and doing terrible things in the process. In the canon ending, Eric basically does the exact same thing that Dr. Cross did to them at the start of the game. Namely, shoot down a passing jet, kidnap a child from the survivors, and sacrifice them to bring their own child back from the dead.
• Molotov Cocktail: You can make a firebomb by combining a bottle of booze with a rag. It makes a good light source and can deal good damage against tougher mutants and cannibals.
• Notice This: Items that can be directly picked up or interacted with glow or have an icon hovering above them. The exception being natural resources (trees, bushes, live animals), that don't show anything like this before being ready to be harvested (cutting a tree, killing a rabbit, etc.)
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Leader cannibals can do a powerful uppercut that not only sends you flying but can kill you instantly. If you haven't been caught, it'll knock you out. If you did get caught prior to that, have a nice flight.
  • Spiders can easily one-shot a player without any armor.
  • The two more common mutant types will be insta-gibbed by the rope swing trap. A player wearing bone armor won't take nearly as much damage, but it's best not to be in the way when the trap starts swinging.
• Offscreen Start Bonus: After you've recovered from the crash, you'll be guided into taking the Plane Axe from the dead stewardess, and run on your merry way. If you take your time to search what's left of the plane, you could rack up some useful things. Of course, you better hurry...
• Optional Boss: A new enemy type added in the 1.10 patch is a giant, walrus-sized worm that appears on the surface at some point after defeating the Final Boss or if a few dozen days pass. It seems to be spawned by the Degraded Boss version of the final boss that appears on the surface. The worm multiples rapidly, and a swarm of them can join together into larger forms, including a giant gorilla-like stomper or even a flying dragon-like form. It's the largest enemy in the game by far and can smash your structures with a single hit.
• Papa Wolf: You and your son's plane gets shot down, you awaken to see a stranger kidnap him. Your main objective: find your son, by any means necessary. Bumped up to Knight Templar Parent in the end, as by the time Eric finds Timmy, he had been sacrificed to bring Megan back to life. Eric intends to use Megan as a sacrifice to bring Timmy back but winds up killing her thus making her useless. Instead Eric does what Dr. Cross did: shoot down a plane, hope there is a child aboard, and sacrifice them to bring Timmy back.
• Power of Love: It's hinted that Timmy didn't come back wrong like the final boss because his father genuinely loved him, unlike Megan, whose father was abusive and at the very least was going through a messy divorce and probably had other underlying psychological issues.
• Precious Photo: Eric has a partly-burned photo of Timmy, which keeps him motivated throughout the game. After finding Timmy dead at the end, if you choose not to resurrect him, Eric burns it.
• Precision Crash:
  • The player's plane crashes within walking distance of the Precursor obelisk that shot it down. May be justified as the obelisk is an Artifact of Doom with supernatural properties.
  • Exaggerated with the second plane, assuming Eric makes the choice to sacrifice another child to save Timmy. It crashes so close to you, its starboard wing gets sheared off on the mountain face directly under the observatory!
• Press Start to Game Over: If you don't leave the area near the plane crash, it'll soon be crawling with cannibals. Better pack up what you need and run.
• Reality Has No Soundtrack: Aside from some Scare Chords, there is no background music whatsoever during gameplay. Zigzagged during the cutscenes, which are few and far between anyway.
• Robinsonade: The core of the game. Harvest food and various materials (leaves, rocks, sticks, etc), scavenge things, build shelters (you actually can create actual camps with customized walls) and tools, make fire.
• Sanity Meter: Downplayed. The game keeps track of your sanity level; sleeping, eating fresh food, listening to music, or sitting down and relaxing causes your sanity to go up. Killing enemies, chopping up dead bodies, eating human flesh, or spending time in the caves causes it to go down. However, the only effect is that lower sanity allows you to see pages in the survival guide that aren't there otherwise...
• Scare Chord: A couple of eerie piano notes are played when a nearby hostile cannibal is about to attack, and then several times during the ensuing fight (until one of you dies or the enemy eventually flees).
• Scenery Dissonance: Despite its bright and mellow ambiance, daytime offers the player little more protection from cannibals than night does.
• Sequel Hook: In a new ending scene added in the v1.00 full release of the game, an adult Timmy has a research board with multiple documents posted on it, the most prominent of which is a picture of an island with "Site 2" written on it, hinting that Sahara Therapeutics may have had a second location conducting their morally dubious experiments.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • Many of the caves have a particular entrance that takes you straight to the key item/unique weapon without having to fight your way through all the cannibals and mutants inside. However, you'd have to know exactly where they are to take advantage of them, either by reading the wiki or having played through the game previously.
  • It's possible to get to the bottom of the sinkhole without having to find and travel through the particularly long and difficult cave that leads there. All you have to do is build a zipline across the sinkhole and drop down in the middle of it so you land in the pool of water at the bottom.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet:
  • Some cannibals act like some kind of leader or shaman and wear skulls (which emit light) on their heads.
  • Bone armor is craftable, and provides considerably more protection than lizard hide.
• Sprint Meter: There is a fatigue meter that depletes when you sprint or use a weapon, then automatically replenishes in a couple of seconds. The fatigue meter is directly linked to the energy meter (the fatigue cap being the current energy level), which gradually decreases unless you eat, drink, and sleep.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Early in development, the premise was mostly an Excuse Plot hinted at by the opening cutscene, summarized by "you just survived a plane crash on a forest peninsula inhabited by cannibal tribes. Survive." As development progressed, however, an increasingly intricate story involving the fates of several previous visitors and inhabitants was added in the form of magazine clips, photos, and sketches scattered around the peninsula. Then you enter The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and things take a turn for the weird.
• Super Drowning Skills: Cannibals and mutants cannot swim at all, and will drown in any water too deep to wade in.
• Super-Strength: Armsy mutants are freakishly strong as they can knock down fully grown trees by swinging their arms, forcing the player to fight on the ground or lure them away from their tree-houses.

• Take Your Time: You may have crash-landed in a mysterious forest and had your son spirited away right in front of you, but nothing will actually happen to him until the endgame. You can spend months establishing yourself as the apex predator of the peninsula and forgetting yourself as a father. In fact, there are two Achievements/Trophies that offer subtle Continue Your Mission, Dammit! digs: one for spending 100 days without finding your kid called "Bad Father", and one for building a gazebo called "You should be looking for Timmy".
• Ten-Second Flashlight: The plastic torch is a flashlight with a very short battery life.
• Terror Hero: You can be one of the intimidating variety if you so choose. It's actually possible to simply scare off most mutant groups appearing during daytime (assuming they aren't instantly hostile) by simply holding your ground and not breaking eye contact. This can backfire if you scare them badly enough to call for backup. If you wear Red Paint, which the cannibals are mentally conditioned to fear, all but the strongest ones will back off or even kneel and cower in fear. Mutants, though, are unaffected due to lacking eyes.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: When the player character's sanity is below 90%, flipping through the survival book reveals a page spread covered in bloody smears, describing how to build gruesome effigies out of severed body parts. When the player character's sanity rises back above the threshold again, the page is nowhere to be seen.
• Throwing the Distraction: Throwing rocks and tennis balls can distract nearby cannibals if they haven't spotted you yet.
• Trailers Always Spoil: Both of the special mutants are shown in a trailer.
• Tree Top Town: An option for player bases. There are special platforms that can be built around tree trunks, which can in turn have other things built on top of them. Ropes can hang down from them, and they can be connected to each other by hanging bridges. They make reasonably defensible areas against the natives. Though some of the creepy mutants can knock over trees...

• Uncertain Doom: In the v1.00 full release of the game, a new scene is added to the ending which takes place from Timmy's point of view, showing that he survived into adulthood and seems to be trying to find the truth behind the strange experiments Sahara Therapeutics was conducting. However, he has another seizure and starts mutating again, with the scene fading leaving it uncertain whether he ends up mutating after all or is able to fight it off again.
• Undead Child: The Final Boss: Megan Cross, revived by Timmy's death at the obelisk, before mutating into a giant Humanoid Abomination. In the canon ending, Timmy becomes one as well.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Once you enter the Sahara research labs, the game turns from Sandbox Survival to something more akin to Half-Life, with you exploring a ruined research facility, climbing through vents, etc.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • As it turns out, not all random berries and mushrooms you find in the woods are good to eat...and the differences between edible and non-edible plants are often subtle.
  • It's also a good idea to wash your hands after getting covered in blood. Preferably quickly, and before eating.
  • And you shouldn't run around in the dark while soaking wet.
  • And raw meat doesn't stay good forever in your backpack.
  • And just because a crazed cannibal set tennis balls on fire and threw them at you doesn't mean it's a good idea to do the same.
  • And while putting heads on pikes is an effective means of intimidation, it also tends to escalate hostile relations...
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The sinkhole. Nothing says "end game goal" like a gigantic pit of ominous doom. Subverted in that it's just the entrance to the real final dungeon, the underground Sahara facility.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There's no real reason to resort to cannibalism, given how plentiful berries and animals are, but the option does exist. Likewise, you can slaughter cannibals as mercilessly as you like and even build effigies from their remains.
• Was Once a Man: The endgame reveals that the mutants were once human, with the extremely mutated creatures apparently being children who were brought back to life by the artifact. It's not clear if the normal mutants are mutated children as well, or adults who were injected with genetic material from the children as part of Sahara Therapeutics' experiments in human longevity. It seems most likely that they're the grown-up version of the mutant babies the mutated children spawn.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: At no point is it ever made clear where exactly the game takes place, but the flora and fauna as well as the fact the various magazines and documents you can find laying around are in American English would strongly suggest a North American location, possibly somewhere in Canada, given that Eric and Timmy are Canadians.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Some fans might have seen it already, but numerous story elements confirm the game is heavily inspired by Lost.
• Wild Wilderness: The Game. The player is stranded on an untamed peninsula with only trees, the local wildlife, the local cannibals, and various mutants for company.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Your fullness is indicated by the stomach on the screen. It slowly decreases over time and you must refill the fullness by consuming food. If your fullness stays empty for too long, you will lose health and eventually die.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The Red Man abducts Timmy for the purpose of sacrificing him to the Artifact of Doom to resurrect his dead daughter. By the time you reach the Sahara facility, Timmy is already dead.
  • In the canon ending, the player jumps in on this too, shooting down a plane with three children on board in order to find a suitable sacrifice to resurrect Timmy.

---