How an environmentalist inspired a work of existential dread

Developer Wakefield Interactive

Publisher Whitethorn Digital

Format PC, consoles TBA

Origin US

Release 2020

Something is wrong with the light. We notice it as we cross the butterfly-filled clearing outside our chalet - a sudden acceleration of the sun, as though hours had passed in a single step. It’s not the only indication that The Forest Cathedral’s lush setting is more than it seems. There’s our handheld scanner, for one thing: this pares the vegetation back to a pixelated crimson gloom, revealing golden lines beneath the soil. There’s our boss, for another: Dr Paul Herman Miller, a real-life Nobel prize winner for his work on the pesticide DDT, here represented as a writhing collage of eyes and lips.

We gather that we are carrying out biological research of some sort, testing bugs and fish for contaminants. Miller tells us to go and check on the fish. To reach their storage area, we must play a game within the game - a deceptively quaint 2D platformer, housed on signboard terminals throughout the forest. Completing levels within the platformer changes the 3D world, as though the two are one environment manifest in different dimensions. Some of these changes are innocuous - connecting a circuit inside the 2D world to power a switch, for example. Others are more alarming. Using a terminal doesn’t block out the background entirely, and the sly movements of distant objects remind us of using the motion tracker in Alien: Isolation.