Paris has been Conquered by Sentient Trees in Forest Reigns | Forest Reigns Gameplay Preview (2025)
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My feelings about Forest Reigns are enthusiasm and disappointment, inflation and deflation, straight off the back of the announcement trailer. On the one hand, as a fan of weird forests, which is to say all forests, I'm keen on the prospect of an FPS set in a post-apocalyptic Paris overrun by sentient, pissed-off trees. It's from a team led by a former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developer, too, and those S.T.A.L.K.E.R. alumni certainly know how to post a good apocalypse. On the other hand, the announcement video suggests a game in which you will mostly treat the frenzied flora as a source of "emergent" cover and terrain traps.
The game's reigning forest isn't "just part of the environment," intones the Steam page, but "a conscious entity with its own desires and intentions". You will "interact with it to reveal its mysteries, use it for defeating enemies, or face its wrath as it reacts to your choices". So far, your choices seem mostly to consist of "shoot it/don't shoot it". The trees don't like being shot, which seems a bit elementary as "desires and intentions" go. I don't want to talk to them, necessarily, but their objecting to being pumped full of AK47 rounds doesn't feel very mysterious.
There's the suggestion of some Gaia theory going on here, but the act of blasting volatile glowy bits or luring plants into strangling foes just looks like a variation on Far Cry's exploding oil drums and baitable predators. Still, that isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, and you may develop more of a relationship with the trees than can really be shown in an edited gameplay overview. Fingers crossed.
I don't think this is open world, but it's advertised as non-linear and mission-based, with factions you can cooperate or compete with to unlock different story outcomes. There's also a crafting system and a variety of guns to modify and coo over. Hah, I bet some of those guns are made out of wood, aka trees. I bet the trees don't like that either. So unreasonable.
Forest Reigns doesn't have a release date. While you wait for one, let me try to lead you into the undergrowth with talk of other tree-themed games. The obvious and most horrible one is Darkwood. It makes the trees in what I've seen of Forest Reigns look like the cute, geometric palms from Sonic The Hedgehog. There's also Witch Strandings, a curious Kojima homage from Strange Scaffold, and the forthcoming Roots Devour, in which you are a tree that drinks blood.