Tl dr – The First Tree is a 3D Platformer with a focus on its pretty imagery and story about a man’s dream about a fox that ties into his stories about his youth. If you’re curious about this game, just watch a playthrough on YouTube - around the time you find yourself bored and wanting to stop, just remember that if you were playing the game you’d still be stuck trudging from one place to the next. Unfortunately, The Last Tree never finds the same depth of emotion or beauty as those games, and its gameplay is so tedious, boring, and drawn out that players will grow bored with this game’s pretty imagery long before they find the path to move on from one area to the next.
We’ve seen this in other, similar games like Journey and Gris. A game can provide an audiovisual experience that’s engaging without testing the player. I don’t need a challenge in every game I play. This game is only a few hours long, and yet I’d say that at least half of that time is spent just running around through large areas trying to find anything interesting to do. Nevertheless, players will be trudging through them, searching for points of interest, their patience tested as they look for something, anything to do. Players traverse really large, open areas, to the point where I might almost be tempted to call this an Open-World game (it’s not), and there is so very, very little to do in these areas. However, even this would be forgivable due to the focus on story and presentation, if the game weren’t stretched so thin. Unfortunately, not only are the visuals not as engaging as what those games offered, but even the gameplay falls short of those games too, with nothing really all that inventive or interesting going on here. When it comes to the gameplay, this is one of those games where said gameplay takes a back seat to the story and the overall look and feel of the presentation, games like Journey and Abzu.
While I may have issues with parts of the presentation here, I can say that the game’s acoustic soundtrack, led by piano and violin melodies, is lovely. This is accompanied by the narration of the male lead and his female companion, both somewhat well-acted, but the writing is a bit unnatural in places. The visuals in this game are somewhat stylized, featuring low-poly 3D characters and environments with a lot of pop-in, but are nevertheless pleasant to look at due to good use of color and lighting. This game has you playing as a fox inside the dream of a man recounting both the dream and tales from his youth to his wife (or perhaps girlfriend… or therapist? It’s not quite clear). The First Tree is a 3D Platformer first released on PC in 2017 and ported to multiple platforms including Nintendo Switch in 2018.
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