Joseph has been dreaming about a wandering fox, which prompts a late night, deep discussion with his girlfriend, Rachel. Joseph recounts his childhood with his father and how that makes him feel now, while also wondering why he’s constantly dreaming about this fox.

Meanwhile, the fox is out searching for her missing cubs. The ending broke me.

Visuals

The First Tree is a beautiful game. The environments look amazing, even if they are quite samey making it easy to get turned around. It’s a 3D low-poly style, which I am a fan of. The colors are natural and muted. The lighting is amazing.

The fox and other animals are very simple looking, and the animations aren’t great. Mama fox does have some moments where she looks quite silly.

Sound Effects + Music

I absolutely love the soundtrack for The First Tree. It’s one of those games I wouldn’t mind leaving running just so I can listen to it. The ambient noises are also great. I’m a sucker for crickets and owls.

The voice acting is also really good. Joseph and Rachel are talking throughout the game, although not constantly. Their voices are calming, yet emotional. Perfect for the conversation they’re having.

Gameplay + Controls

The First Tree has very simple gameplay and controls You just control Mama Fox through the landscape. She can walk or run, jump, double jump, and dig. Your goal is get her through each area and into the next one. There will be memories to dig up along the way, along with stars to collect. At first I wasn’t sure what the point of the stars were, except as occasional waypoints. But once you reach the end, their purpose becomes clear, and I completely lost it. I was already crying at finding her third cub, but that? Too much.

The epilogue of the game switches to a first person perspective as Joseph, which I hate. I find first person navigation nauseating. I gave it a try, hoping I would quickly find where I was suppose to be going, but I didn’t and just closed the game.

Replayability

The First Tree is pretty short, so it would be easy to replay in order to grab missed achievements. I only got 4 of the 14, but I also wasn’t taking time to explore every inch of the world. I mostly focused on not getting lost, since there isn’t too much direction. I may go through it again to find all of the secrets.

Overall

I really liked The First Tree. While I wasn’t completely invested in Joseph’s story, I was all in with Mama fox.

Oh god, this looks so harsh; it kinda is. This is the quintessential gamedev marketing tutorial game, and I don't think this is a good direction at all. I remember seeing footage of it in various subreddits, either for gifs or games or gamedev. It had a certain recognizability, mostly by having polished visuals and having some form of art direction which the usual in-progress video typically lack in these communities (which isn't a bad thing!). This has since been covered by the author in talks involving the marketing, and it really feels mostly like an assembly of trailer material.

Despite the serious topic, it doesn't manage to translate it to its visuals or gameplay at all and remains utterly unmemorable and shallow. I don't remember the dialogue being particularly bad, but I barely remember that it had any dialogue and I'm not even sure why - it mostly stems from the blandness of the gameplay that you're trying to push through while a podcast-like narrative is happening. While the stylized visuals lend themselves to social media marketing content, they're oversaturated in practice, until you don't even notice them and everything feels same-y. This is actually visible in many indie games, where you pick a color theme and run with it.

Even the overall theme doesn't evoke anything interesting or great or new. Nature is a metaphor, you gotta collect nature things and reach a nature goal and at some points, the reality bleeds through. But having experienced many adventures, in comparison I'd say that running through stylized environments collecting things doesn't suddenly translate into dealing with death or any of the supposed darker themes.

Especially considering its release date, it doesn't try anything new and barely tries to venture outside the established playing field. I should probably play the author's first game to see if it's better and maybe see where they went wrong. Because unfortunately, this game remains uninteresting and unmemorable in its entirety. Play RiME instead.

The First Tree is a game where a man is telling about a dream he had to his wife, of a mother fox who lost her cubs and went looking for them. He explains how along her journey, the fox passed by trinkets from the man's past. And he starts reminiscing about his deceased father. While you, the fox, walk along the land of memories looking for your cubs

Although there isn't much of replayability value other than for gathering achievements, I could see someone play it to just relax and walk around the beautiful environment. Though if you wanted to play a walking simulator, I would probably pick something else.

Anyway, it's alright I guess. Its story isn't particularly revolutionary in any way and the gameplay isn't that interesting, but it's still nice to walk along the pretty landscapes and listen to the main character talking about his childhood memories. I would recommend to buy it from a good sale, if you really want to

Slow fox running simulator wherein you seek out glowing objects while listening to a couple's childhood stories.
+ nice music that gives the game a meditative nature if nothing else
+ decent voice acting (excluding the recording quality)
+ very short playtime (1-2 hours for non-completionists)
+ neat ending sequence due to a vocal song and slight community involvement
- useless collectibles strewn about
- bothersome pop-in of trees and grass
- boring environments in terms of design (needlessly large and arbitrarily filled with generic assets)
- trite narrative that is told in an awkward dialogue format
- incredibly simplistic gameplay with floaty movement — the only thing you'll be doing

The story is pretty great but it would probably work better as a short story or a film. It is told purely through voice-over, and so doesn't really benefit much from being a videogame. The ending was quite poignant and well-crafted though.

The gameplay on the other hand feels like a early tech-demo for Annapurna's Journey, where you explore some admittedly quite beautiful landscapes, while the voice-over tries really hard to tie it into the almost unrelated story.

Overall, it's okay but only really starts to reach it's full potential at the very end. A hesitant Yes from me, but there really are much better games also available for this price-point. Loved the soundtrack though.