The Forest Cathedral

I spend a lot of time hunting for games that shouldn't exist, and The Forest Cathedral absolutely qualifies. One person, Brian Wilson, built a first-person environmental thriller around Rachel Carson's real-world research into DDT, translating field biology and institutional silencing into an interactive walk through a poisoned island. That's a sentence I never expected to type about a video game, and the fact that it exists at all earns it some grace before we get into where it stumbles. The structure is genuinely unusual. You explore Science Island in first-person, using a scanner called the iRGB to observe the wildlife, check mosquito populations in the swamps, track fish vitals, deliver worms to birds. The pacing is slow and contemplative, closer to a walking sim than a thriller, and the island itself is lush enough to carry that quieter mode. Then, whenever Rachel needs to operate a piece of machinery, the camera cuts to a small terminal screen and you take control of a pixelated character called Little Man, a tiny red figure navigating retro 2D levels filled with spike pits, walls to cling to, dash moves, and box-placement puzzles that unlock something in the 3D world once solved. It is, functionally, a game inside a game, and the visual contrast between the rendered forest and the stark black-and-red platforming screen has a strange, low-fi charm. The two modes never fully blur into each other, which some reviewers found disjointed and which I think is actually doing something intentional, though the execution doesn't always stick the landing. Where it earns its place on a watchlist: the soundscape. Wilson composed parts of the original soundtrack himself, and the ambient hum of insects and rustling canopy does real work in pulling you into the island's ecosystem. The iRGB scanner's pixelated overlays on the environment are a small, clever design touch. And the core concept, translating Carson's David-versus-Goliath battle against the chemical industry into a game where you genuinely feel observed and constrained, carries a psychological weight that lingers a little after the credits. The setting is drawn from Cook Forest State Park in western Pennsylvania, the same region where both Wilson and Carson grew up, and that local sincerity comes through in the world. On the rougher side: the 2D platforming is serviceable but forgettable, and reviewers across the board noted that it never escalates into anything demanding. The narrative takes creative liberties with Carson's biography that occasionally feel forced rather than illuminating, and the voice acting is uneven, with some dialogue choices that land as quirky rather than characterful. The 3D sections carry visible budget constraints in character model animation, and the story's conclusion drew polarized reactions, with some finding it appropriately unsettling and others feeling it arrived too abruptly. Steam's small sample of user reviews sits at mixed, and the critical reception hovered in a similar middle range, though the game did earn a Nuovo Award nomination at the 2024 Independent Games Festival, which tells you something about the ambition being recognized even where the craft fell short. Accessibility options including No Spikes mode and Float Mode for the Little Man sections show real thoughtfulness, which matters for a short game whose platforming friction might otherwise lock players out. This is a game for players who read the back of a book before buying it, who found the premise of Something in the Water or Never Alone compelling enough to push through uneven mechanics. It clocks in short, probably two to four hours, and it knows roughly when to end. If eco-horror and handcrafted indie sincerity are your frequency, the island is worth visiting once. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified.

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