Back when I was in middle school in 2013, I remember getting hyped with a friend after seeing this get announced. I feel like it's the only thing we talked about for months and we were both extremely excited to play it. Come 2022, my friend and I moved away from each other not even a year after the announcement. He ended up getting the game in late 2017 and seemed to enjoy it with his 111 hours but never finished the story. And as the 2022 Steam Summer Sale comes around, I finally got the chance to get my hands on it.

Playing this game co-op was a really fun and silly experience. At the start I was expecting to be annoyed by the survival mechanics as we (a different friend) couldn't find a great place to settle ourselves. It took a while but we got into the swing of things and slowly got into the flow of the game. Then, we discovered the caves. At that point we unintentionally started speedrunning the game, going from cave to cave to cave and grabbing every single useful piece of gear we could. Within a span of only a couple hours, we hadn't done anything for progressing with a base but we were completely decked out to the nines. One more game session later and we finally managed to knock the game out, clearing the final cave and area within an hour and a half. This playthrough was full of goofs and silly moments that were really memorable and despite the fact I didn't find the core gameplay that interesting, I really enjoyed my full experience with The Forest, nearly nine years after I wanted to.