I make no secret that I like platformers. But the last few years have seen the genre shift from something fun to something "HAHA YOU DIED YOU LOSE HAHA" in terms of difficulty. And many retro throwback titles that failed to capture what made the platformer games of the 80s and 90s actually entertaining. Something that is more than a colour pallet and bad controls.

Fox N Forests showed up while browsing Kickstarter, and a few prompts into my social network feeds. So, I backed it on the promise it showed. An early alpha proved the devs knew what they were doing, and the final game was played shortly after release.

Made by German devs "Bonus Level Entertainment" Fox N Forests stars Rick the Fox. Who wants to commit a little crime by eating a fellow sophont, a bird named "Patty". As you do. Patty quickly convinces him he would be better off saving the forest by collecting the magic bark of a wise old tree and taking control over the seasons.

The magic Tree gives Rick a magical crossbow, allowing him to rapidly shoot monsters that come in his path. And the ability to flip seasons to change the environment. Patty agrees to help, even though Rick was about to eat her only a minute ago.

The main gimmick is the ability to switch seasons in the various levels. Level 1-1 quickly demonstrates this by having the insta-kill water trope as a hazard for Rick to pass. Holding his sword high, the landscape switches to winter a Rick can cross a frozen lake instead.

Swapping seasons rapidly decreases your Mana Bar, and until you swap back to the standard season once the mana runs out. This looks like you have some timing issues until you realise there's a tiny amount of metroidvania elements in the game. It's nothing massive, but some points of levels can only be accessed under certain seasons. Or with certain weapon upgrades...

The coins, rocks, and crystals Rick collects can be traded in at the hub. Three stores, all run by Patty, allow various upgrades to make Rick's life easier.

Powerups to enable Rick to attack overhead, or various spinning attacks when jumping can be trained and upgraded. While you can get to many areas without these, they do make it easier to slash the respawning bugs and spooks away.

But trading in the bark you find to the magic Tree will give you new arrow types to fire. Green spread shots, Red Rapid Fire, and Blue Boomerang arrows. Hitting little targets in the world will open up new parts to extra items, alt routes, and more collectables.

You're going to need to collect the 'nuts' to advance map progress as they are required to grow the saplings that open up new levels for you. It's nothing too annoying or repetitive, most nuts can be collected on the second pass, and gives you a chance to try the level again before it moves on to something else and collect more loot.

One thing I do like is that each level map introduced new concepts. Rather than throwing things at you late in the game ruining your pacing. You encounter them often and early.

The 'Flying' missions where Rick hops on Patty's back are the most difficult, as you only have a single 1HP. However in some odd way, they are also the easiest to pass as the penalty for failure is smaller and the checkpoints are reasonable.

There's also a decent tower assault level at 3-1 that trains you for the level's boss fight. Unlike some other game, let's cal it Trine, because that was its name.

Basically, there's very few gotchas in this one. The only thing I totally missed was in 4-1/2 where you can climb... And breath underwater for a limited time. Since 1-1 tells you that water = dead, this threw me off a bit. And the air-bubbles that are under water make you think like a Sonic game and expect to breath them in when a large one forms. But, nope! Health Loss if you stay under too long.

This is the only real criticism I have here. It was easy to get stuck with no mana, and the wait for it to recharge has me scrambling to find an exit. Turns out all I needed to do was press UP on a background object. I did replay some other levels after this, but could not find a similar place to make Rick climb.

The only items I did not use in the game were the 'potions'. These grant you limited abilities, and can be refilled in the hub map. I just never felt the need for them and they came off as superfluous. It's a nice little boost if you are struggling though.

I rather liked this one. It's fun. Has responsive controls. Gorgeous 16bit+ era inspired graphics. The music is rather calming, and has urgency when it needs to. SFX makes things feel like they connect. And the in game achievements are reasonable.

But the big one? It is not a super-difficult perma-death style game that so many many retro games are aping. This one? This one has charm, and enough to do to get you to return and try to 100% it.

Thumbs up.

Heck, I even played this one with a controller, not the Keyboard and Mouse!

Game Acquisition: Kickstarter (Tier: R03: EARLY BIRD (PARTRIDGE) )
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 2 - 20 May 2018 & 2 June 2018
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7
Processor: 2 GHZ
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GT 630 or AMD Radeon HD 5570
Storage: 700 MB available space