Indie games are all the rage right now and here’s one that pays homage to the classic era of the Super Nintendo. Fox N Forests looks, feels, and sounds like a classic Super Nintendo game and has a mechanic out of the Super Nintendo era where you play as a Fox named Rick who can change the seasons at the drop of a hat. You will need to master the seasonal change mechanic to make it through each stage and collect all the seeds hidden so you can discover everything.
You also have magical spells at your disposal as well and you will have to play stages over again because when you first play them, you probably won’t have the right magic. For example, you can shoot different magical arrows to unlock entryways in each stage but like I said, during the initial playthrough of the stage, you probably won’t have the right magical spell to do anything. The magical spells use the same power as the season changes so you will have to watch when you attack and use the change.
The meter does recharge over time during gameplay but that could be the different between you finding that special item. There are checkpoints during the levels but if you don’t have the money to pay for them, you won’t be able to activate them. They aren’t expensive that shouldn’t be an issue but if you keep dying, then you might have an issue on your hands.
You’ll be able to check out the forest plaza to upgrade your Fox with different abilities and spells, not for free of course. You can spend your hard earned money on attacks and items from your smart mouthed bird friend, Patty, while in the forest plaza. You can also upgrade your health as well so make sure you collect all the money/coins as you can during gameplay. The music sounds just a Super Nintendo game and it would fit in perfectly in any Super Nintendo fan’s collection.
Fox N Forests has a perfect amount of action music and cool tones that could be played during ice levels and it just so happens that the game does just that. The songs are catchy as well! The writing during the game is funny and well thought out as well. You have a Fox and bird thrown together to basically save the world and they both can’t stand each other but they work it out. They have their banter, back and forth, and their relationship changes over the course of the adventure and you can see that through the story and the writing.
Innovative boss fights were another thing that stood out during gameplay and you needed to use the seasonal change to perfection. One battle had you fight a frog but you had to figure out how to use the seasonal change to hit him and in the Pax East demo, you fought a Bee and had to do the same thing with the seasonal change. It’s games that go this extra mile that make show that the developers but time into their product. However, It felt like there was way too much to collect as well as the feel of repetition snuck into the game way too early into the adventure.
If you get the feel that you will need to replay levels during the first level and it’s a hassle, then “replay” is going to be annoying when you have to do it later on in the game. The controls weren’t as sharp/tight as they needed to be as simple jumps were tough and basic enemies were getting in the way. It’s these reasons that I’m giving Fox N Forests for the Nintendo Switch a 7/10. I would like to thanks Eurovideo for the review code.