The Forest Quartet

I have a soft spot for games that feel like they were made by one family around a single dining-room table, and The Forest Quartet earns that description more literally than most. Developer Mads Vadsholt built it across years of part-time work, drew on his mother's death from cancer as the emotional spine, and brought in his father to compose the original jazz score and his sister to voice the lead character, Nina. The Danish Radio Big Band performed the soundtrack. You feel all of that personal weight within the first five minutes of play, and it does not let up. The structure is clean and unambiguous: three isometric acts, one per surviving band member, each with its own distinct puzzle logic and a corrupted forest environment that mirrors the character's emotional state. Kirk's act fills his landscape with spreading fungus and asks you to carry energy blocks to power giant, instrument-shaped generators. JB's act plunges the forest into darkness and has you chaining together glowing matchstick bridges and luring shadow creatures away from light sources. The third act transforms Nina's spirit entirely into a swarm of butterflies to thread through underground pipes and turn water wheels against a spreading fire. The mechanics are deliberately gentle: you float, you sing to activate objects, you snap your fingers to grab and manipulate. None of these puzzles will challenge a seasoned puzzle-game player for more than a few seconds. That is not a bug. Keeping the friction low means the audio and the grief-soaked atmosphere stay in the foreground, and the audio here is extraordinary. Headphones are not optional if you want the full effect: every interaction bends and distorts sounds through some kind of spatial jazz prism, and the interlude sequences, where full jazz compositions play against candid-interview voice snippets from the band, feel like stumbling onto a late-night radio programme nobody else knows about. The honest problem is length and depth. Most players finish in 90 minutes to two hours, and the puzzles never truly compound on each other in the way you hope they might. The final quarter of the game blends the mechanics together, and it is the most satisfying section as a result, which only confirms how much more there could have been. The lack of a pause function is a genuine annoyance on PC. Pressing Escape overlays a menu but the world keeps running, meaning any cutscene you step away from mid-scene is simply gone. Ultra-wide monitor users will see black bars. These are real roughnesses from a small first-time team, and worth naming plainly. What the game gets completely right, though, is tone. The three band members each grieve differently: one withdraws into depression, one into anxiety and darkness, one into anger. The puzzle environments visualise those states beautifully rather than just labelling them. The art style sits in stylised 3D with celestial, heavy lighting that makes the whole forest feel like a space outside normal time. The game won the Excellence in Audio award at the 2023 Independent Games Festival, and that recognition is not a surprise. What might surprise you is how the ending lands. Several reviewers noted genuine tears. I believe them. A game made this directly from real loss tends to transmit that loss through the screen in a way that more polished, more expensive productions simply cannot. The Forest Quartet is not for players who measure value in hours or puzzle complexity. It is for people who understand that some things are the right length. If you have ever lost someone in a creative community, if jazz means anything to you, or if you just want something quiet and handmade before the lights go out, this is worth your evening.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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