GAME REVIEW: The First Tree (2017)
A story about grief that didn’t stick
I bought The First Tree by David Wehle a few months ago when it was on sale, to play with a friend of mine. As of recently, he came to visit and we finally got the chance to play the game. Per the trailer, I had been given the impression that this was an indie video game that layered two stories: that of a man and his partner in the real world (Joseph and Rachel, respectively) and Joseph’s dream of a fox mother searching for her kits. It was supposed to be a deep story, well-rated, with an ecological basis, or at least that was what I thought was the case from the trailer; the latter part I may have misunderstood.
I have to admit… this game just really didn’t hit for me. But because I don’t enjoy being needlessly negative, I will shout out a few nice things about it before I delve into why it missed its mark.
First of all, for a simple game made by more or less one guy, it’s nice enough, especially for a cheap price. The visuals were fine for an indie game—nothing to phone home about but perfectly adequate for what it was. There was a lot of nice use of lens flare and you could really feel the influence from Journey at times when looking for the way forward by following the sun (and I love Journey). Also, the music and ambiance were really nice throughout. Though the landscape was pretty simplified, it did have a lot of rich sounds in it that helped it come to life. And the voice acting was very nice—you could tell it was done by the maker and his partner, so it did feel human, even if I feel like they used first names and personal endearments a bit too often to sound totally organic.
Beyond that, however, the game sort of lost me. First of all, the fox metaphor just didn’t land. I’ll explore this a little more in the Spoiler Zone down below, but the entire journey with the fox really didn’t have much to do with the meta story behind the gameplay. Apparently this wasn’t something important and symbolic that I missed, either; the maker chose foxes because he liked them and they had some personal significance for him. So the journey of the fox had no roots in anything ecological or mythological or related to the overarching story at all… which makes me ask why the game was framed in this way in the first place. It was just a skin upon which to paint the meta tale and I admit that I would have hoped for something a bit more interconnected to the actual story. If I’m being totally honest, I’m not convinced that the foxes and the entire framing of the setting should have been used to tell this story at all. This guy clearly wanted to work through some grief with this game and I hope he did, but the execution was just a big ol’ swing and a miss with the foxes.
Then we have the story itself and the delving into grief. As someone who lost one of the most important people in the world to me permanently in 2023, I’m no stranger to grief. I’m also perfectly aware that people experience and get through grief in different ways, so in no way am I crapping on anyone who did relate to what the author went through via this game. Nor am I crapping on the author’s grief either. It’s just that I didn’t really vibe with the story or get what point it was trying to make. I’ll go into this more in the Spoiler Zone down below.
Beyond the story, there were a few big issues with the overall gameplay. As I said, the player’s role in the game is to be a fox, who is searching for her lost kits. The mechanics are very simple, with a walk, run, jump, and interact function on the controller. However, when I’m playing a story-based game that doesn’t require a lot of gameplay… I don’t want a lot of gameplay. This was a minor issue in Minute of Islands, but it was more so in The First Tree. For example, the big open world? If I want to run around in a big open world, I’ll play a game like Skyrim, where I can interact with the world and touch and pick all of the different things. I want to explore and do things in that world. But you can’t interact with the world at all in this game unless you’re unearthing a memento from Joseph’s life.
Regarding the world… if I want to explore a world for its beauty, I’ll play a game like Journey or Flower or Eastshade. This world looked nice at first, but the lack of detail that went into the programming of the setting did make it all a bit samey after a while. Nice, but not very diverse. And it’s not linear or streamlined in any way, so even though I didn’t get lost a lot, I did get very lost eventually and had to look up a walkthrough to help find my way forward… not something I feel I should need to do in a story game.
Furthermore, the few controls the game did have were clunky. The sprint function was way slower than I would have hoped (the sprint speed could have been the regular speed, IMO). There were little stars that you were supposed to collect, but why you were supposed to collect them was never addressed—sometimes they were signals that you were on the right path forward, but they were also just hidden around the world in secret places too.
The jump function was also annoying at times and there were a few moments where you had to collect butterflies to allow you to jump higher. However, because the jump was clunky, I had to repeat this multiple times and, every time, I had to run around a really large area at a really mediocre run speed. It wasn’t very fun for me as a player, to just feel annoyed that my jump didn’t work and get more annoyed because I had to run around an overly large space for several minutes doing nothing engaging just to retry. None of that felt relevant to the story being told.
The levels were also strange and inconsistent. You never seem to return to any familiar place at any point, so it was just a lot of running around, trying to figure out what will lead you forward, seemingly with the hope of the player enjoying the world around them. However, there was no coherent way to get from A to B if you couldn’t find a light to follow, nor was it trippy enough to really feel like a proper dreamspace. I might have enjoyed the world, but ultimately, it was too big and too lacking in detail to have the effect it was hoping for.
Lastly, the metaphor of the first tree itself… frankly, I just didn’t get what it had to do with anything. I didn’t understand what it solved, what it meant for the fox, nor what it was supposed to represent for the grieving Joseph. It’s mentioned here or there in the story, but they never end up saying anything particularly profound or even interesting about it. The ending of that part of the story was so limp that I don’t even remember it, and I played the game yesterday as of writing this.
On the whole, this game feels very much like it was made with love by someone who didn’t have an editor. It reminds me of my own writing, 15 years ago, when I had a lot of cool ideas but no through-lines that gave them depth or meaning. And it’s only something I’ve learned with the help of more seasoned people’s feedback. This game feels like the first draft of a story, not the polished, deep, and meaningful final edit. However, that doesn’t mean some people won’t be able to get something out of it. Just for me, as someone who is still very actively grieving a loss, I was hoping for a bit more insight and depth from the story and gameplay.
On the whole, it’s not a waste of money to spend a buck on a game that takes an hour or two to play and is overall pleasant, but on the whole of things, I wasn’t particularly impressed, nor was my friend, as he couldn’t figure out what any of these metaphors were supposed to represent either. Of course… maybe it just totally went over our heads, but in my case, I’ll cry over anything relating to death these days if I feel like it represents my grief even in the tiniest of ways and this game just, frankly, didn’t. I’d shout it out if I felt like it was fun to play through, but in the end, I really can’t say it did much for me on that front either. Unfortunately, this one ends up being a full pass.
SPOILER ZONE
Now let’s talk story and why this didn’t work for me. The story is split, really, into three parts:
Joseph & Rachel (the meta story)
The fox and her kits
The first tree
Now, while the first tree is somewhat entangled in both stories, I didn’t click with the stories individually or in how they were (or weren’t) interconnected with each other.
In the human part, Joseph tells his partner, Rachel, about a dream that he had, about a fox trying to find her lost kits. She asks him to tell her about it and he ends up going into the dream and how it’s stirring up feelings over what turns out to be the recent death of his father. Joseph and his father had a good relationship in their youth—the father worked in a lumber mill but did woodcarving and when he was young, Joseph wanted to be just like him. However, he had an awkward teenage phase that resulted in him getting arrested, which in turn led to a blowout with his father that they never quite recovered from. Joseph also mentions other significant memories that led to their distancing, like the death of his father’s coworker. Joseph knew he handled the situation badly but never dealt with it in the aftermath. He then seemed to have just sat back and allowed the estrangement to settle in, but it seems that, now that his father is dead, Joseph has a lot of feelings, both positive and negative, that he never delved into or sorted out and is lamenting the fact that he is responsible for his lack of closure. During this long speech, Rachel tells a bit of her own history and how grateful she is to have Joseph in her life; this is something she reiterates many times, but Joseph never really reacts to. In the end, it doesn’t feel like there’s any real closure or understanding reached. It’s a good story about the father-son relationship and where and how it failed, but the story doesn’t really go anywhere or reach a satisfying conclusion.
Then there’s the mother fox searching for her kits. This story… I really didn’t get it. Straight-up? The kits are all dead. You find the first one immediately lying unmoving on the ground, but it’s just dead and you just move on, like it’s nothing. This was… upsetting to me. It felt like it deserved a moment, but the fox moves on and the player is like, “wait, what, is it dead? Am I just leaving? What?” As the fox, you dig up Joseph’s memories: things like paintings, newspapers, letters, that sort of stuff. But mementos are also littered around the dream world and you can’t interact with them. The fox then eventually starts encountering what appears to be a large wolf in the distance as it finds its dead kits. I suppose the implication is that the wolf killed the kits, but… why? And what does the wolf represent? Yet it is in following the wolf that the fox reaches the first tree, though I still have no idea why the tree is relevant to the fox, nor what the wolf represents. Why were all the cubs dead? What does the fox’s grief have to do with Joseph’s and how does it reflect him and his journey? I have no idea. As far as I’m able to understand, it just doesn’t.
The last story is then that of the first tree. I’m sure it was supposed to represent something important, but the only thing I recall thinking was, “this isn’t real mythology.” Whatever meaning the writer had found in the idea of the first tree—and it clearly meant something to him—wasn’t a meaning learned from some ancient connection to nature or some lore involving trees or some deeper realization about the nature of life and death. It was a made-up metaphor about a made-up first tree, and somehow that also bummed me out, because I am also interested in earth-history and nature and the long impact of things over time. So to have it all be something totally fabricated from this guy’s imagination into something that means something for him… cool, good for him, but it again just really didn’t connect to me in any significant way, sadly.
The game ultimately ends in Joseph’s first-person view, chasing an ethereal fox down the mountainside to the first tree… but the ending really just felt like a knockoff of the ending of Journey, which is a wild rush through a beautiful landscape to a long-sought final destination. It felt cheap, because this game clearly didn’t have the same budget and team, but still… when you’ve played Journey, a game like this has to work quite hard to surpass it and it won’t do that with simple skins, even if they did seem beefed up a tad from the fox’s dream setting. I didn’t feel like I was hitting a catharsis, I just felt like I went through a digital run through the woods while the seasons rapidly changed from winter to summer around me for some strange reason.
On the whole, I see that this clearly meant something to David and I hope he has come to a place of peace and understand with the loss of his father and their unresolved relationship (assuming this game was autobiographical), but I don’t feel like enough thought was given to the game to make it as universally relatable as it could have been with a little more depth and insight.
Enjoy Bear’s writing? Consider joining her mailing list to keep up-to-date!
