The Forest Cathedral review – an unnaturally intense ecological puzzle game

Video games are often getaways to ravishing natural worlds. The Forest Cathedral transports you to one whose beauty is a little too intense, mixing the showroom gloss of stock graphics with the awful vividness of Sylvia Plath’s hospital tulips. It’s a first-person puzzle game based on the work of Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring documented the impact of chemical pest control on ecosystems, including the widely banned insecticide DDT. The game offers a compressed, spacey abstraction of Carson’s life, including her romance with Dorothy Freeman, clashes with the chemical industry and her death from cancer soon after Silent Spring’s publication.

Carson appears in the game as a fresh-faced researcher, monitoring the animals on a small island. Over a couple of hours you explore using an augmented-reality lens, which reveals glowing contaminants in organisms and the cables snaking beneath the soil and trees. These cables lead to trunk-mounted terminals, where you play a punishing Metroid-style platformer, its spiky dungeons roamed by two-dimensional cousins of the bugs and fish in Carson’s charge. Completing levels of this game-within-the-game activates machines in the 3D world, but there are eerier outcomes, too: sometimes, things occur in the background in your peripheral vision while you’re concentrating on a terminal.

The Forest Cathedral can feel like a homage to 2016 puzzle adventure The Witness, which also has you completing puzzles on screens dotted around an island. But where The Witness is a schoolmasterly unpacking of puzzle concepts, this game feels broken and traumatised. In mixing Carson’s experience of her illness with her analysis of other unwell bodies, it taps into a vein of shock and dislocation that seems to manifest throughout the simulation.

The writing has a forced, storybook air, dropping the moral in your lap like a gasping fish. The voice-acting is dazed and dissatisfying. The scene transitions are jarring – huge title cards accompanied by bursts of staticky guitar. The perspective often detaches without warning from Carson’s body, twisting upside down as it follows terminals along rails to the treetops. The animals are mildly irritating, pecking at screens and stealing objects you need to progress, and then are the shambling forms you spy deeper in the woods. Rendered as pixelart emojis, the faces of Carson and Freeman glance about during story beats as though eyeing the exits.

The Forest Cathedral isn’t a horror game – it ends with the standard biopic reel of achievements, and harbours nothing truly gruesome. But it’s touched by horror nonetheless. Its bucolic idyll is wholly virtual and sickening in its splendour. It presents nature not as a space for healing and restoration, but a layered delusion, cultivated and contaminated by human forces.

The Forest Cathedral is out now; £11.39

The author appears in the “special thanks” section of the game’s credits, having previously interviewed its developer. He was unaware of this when writing this review.