VVideo games are often getaways into stunning natural worlds. The Cathedral of the Forest transports you to one whose beauty is a bit also intense, mixing the showroom brightness of stock graphics with the terrifying 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, spatial abstraction of Carson’s life, including her romance with Dorothy Freeman, her clashes with the chemical industry, and her death from cancer shortly after the publication of Silent Spring.
Carson appears in the game as a fresh-faced researcher, monitoring the animals on a small island. For a couple of hours he explores using an augmented reality lens, which reveals glowing contaminants in organisms and cables that snake beneath the ground and trees. These wires lead to trunk-mounted terminals, where you play a Metroid-esque platformer, its spiky dungeons roamed by two-dimensional cousins of Carson’s bug-and-fish. Completing the levels of this game-within-the-game activates the machines in the 3D world, but there are also weirder results: Sometimes things happen in the background of your peripheral vision while you’re concentrating on a terminal.
The Forest Cathedral can feel like an homage to 2016’s puzzle adventure The Witness, also having you complete puzzles on screens spread across an island. But where The Witness is a masterful unpacking of puzzle concepts, this game feels broken and traumatized. By blending Carson’s experience of his illness with his analysis of other diseased bodies, he taps into a vein of shock and dislocation that seems to play out throughout the simulation.
The writing has a forced storybook air, dropping the moral into your lap like a gasping fish. The voice acting is groggy and subpar. The scene transitions are jarring: huge title cards accompanied by bursts of static guitar. The perspective often separates without warning from Carson’s body, turning upside down as he follows the terminals along the rails to the treetops. The animals are mildly irritating, pecking at screens and stealing items you need to progress, and then it’s the wobbly shapes you spy in the depths of the forest. Rendered as pixelart emojis, the faces of Carson and Freeman look around during story beats as if they’re looking at the exits.
The Forest Cathedral isn’t a horror game: it ends up with the standard bio achievement scroll and doesn’t house anything truly gruesome. But he is touched by horror nonetheless. Their bucolic idyll is wholly virtual and repugnant in its splendor. He presents nature not as a space for healing and restoration, but as a layered illusion, cultivated and polluted by human forces.
The Cathedral of the Forest is now available; £11.39
The author appears in the “special thanks” section of the game’s credits, having previously interviewed its developer. He was not aware of this when writing this review.