Ever since the Forest Mother helped save young Jean she has been teaching her the secrets of the forest. One day when Jean returns to the cottage to find a note from the Forest Mother, she knows she must enter the forest and find her.
We have all got lost as a kid, for Jean it was in the majestic forest, for me it was Jersey (not quite the same but hey....) Being taken under the tutelage of the Forest Mother she now must use the spells and potions she has been taught so far in order to discover what has happened to her.
This is a cute game that looks like it belongs to the SNES era of console gaming. The basic premise is that you play as a character that needs to wander through the eponymous forest to discover what happened to the Forest Mother, who is missing. What this means is that you’ll traverse 60 levels of item-collection action to arrive at the end, where you will learn the answer to this mystery.
In practice, this is a puzzle game on the order of those type of games that have only one solution and can only be solved one way. The key to these kinds of games lies in fully understanding the mechanics of the pieces on the board, so to speak, and also the underlying philosophy behind the puzzles.
In the beginning you get to chose one of six characters - two female, two male and two creatures of indeterminate gender. There doesn’t seem to be any real functional difference between any of the six, so it is purely a matter of aesthetics. Once you have chosen your character, they are placed in to the middle of a well-tended, grassy field bordered by impassable hedges. The goal of each level is to collect the given numbers of talismans (colourful shapes which otherwise have no important meaning) in order to open the door of a nearby cottage, which leads to the next level.