Forest Grove Demo PC Review
Forest Grove is a mystery game where you uncover clues, solve various puzzles, and piece together certain scenarios that create stories that you can use for your own conclusions. You will be playing as a forensic bureau agent who will utilize the latest forensic technology, “The Nanodeck.” With it, you will investigate various crime scenes, collect evidence, and simulate various events in the scene of the crime.
The Setting
The story begins when Zooey Kunstimatigaard, the daughter of a known billionaire, was reported missing by her stepmother Mary. She was last seen in her bedroom in Forest Grove and the Remote Forensics Bureau uses this opportunity to test out their latest crime-investigation technology.
Gameplay
Forest Grove’s gameplay is a straightforward semi-open world game where you explore a crime scene riddled with scattered evidence across the map. Your goal is to basically associate all the scattered evidence to reveal new leads and deduce the truth within.
You’re provided with several gadgets like a hovercam that recreates scenes based on biotraces you collected. There’s also the digital and physical evidence board that connects all evidence you collected. Use these gadgets to the fullest to make sense of the evidence gathered and solve various puzzles on the map.
Since all of the scattered clues are forensic-based evidence. Most of the time you’ll be just analyzing various objects and pinpointing who’s connected to that evidence. Seems simple enough.
The user interface is a bit confusing since there is only minimal tutorial, and some key parts are left behind, especially the fact that you can “fast travel” to certain rooms in the area. The menu and gadget UI are also on the same panel making them a little messy and populated.
Additionally, the number of objects you can interact with are limited and are marked whenever you’re within their vicinity which makes the game fairly easy if you have properly functioning eyes.
Despite only showcasing a few puzzles in the demo, they were challenging enough to be enjoyable. Flexing your brain cells isn’t so bad sometimes.
Graphics
Based on the demo, the textures of the map and the play area feel natural to the eye but the fact that the number of interactable objects is only limited to the ones you’re supposed to interact with, most of the objects in the map are not dynamic.
PC Performance
The game was tested on Ryzen 7 5800X @ 3.80 GHz GTX 1070 Ti, 32GB RAM.
There are minimal framerate drops during the demo and occasional bugs whenever you’re trying to load a save file while you’re in-game. Overall, the gameplay stage is smooth and didn’t encounter any occasional glitching during the entire demo gameplay.
Final Thoughts
As mentioned above, if you have functioning eyes the game will be easy enough to finish because most of the objects are not dynamic and clues are marked whenever you’re in the vicinity. Regardless of this, the game has a quite interesting story that will keep you intrigued. We were left hanging since the demo ended after discovering the first evidence that leads to a person of interest.
Overall it’s a 7/10 experience so far and we would recommend it for gamers who like to play mystery and thriller games. The build that we tested was only a trial version so expect more to come in the games’ full version
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