The Turning Forest review: a short and sweet musical fairytale

This short and sweet fairytale-esque experience captures a child’s journey to a magical forest, where they befriend a magnificent mythical creature. Presenting a bright and imaginative fantasy world, albeit in the form of a small number of environments rather than a navigable universe, director Oscar Raby incorporates basic interactive elements that, while inessential, augment the narrative in ways that don’t feel tokenistic.

In the first immersion we’re placed in a central position in a magical forest painted in warm autumnal colours—lots of orange, red, and yellow—and control a floating green leaf that leaves a trail of white light when moved. It becomes clear, upon experimentation, that his trail can activate different parts of the tableau. There’s a maroon coloured fallen tree lying horizontal on the ground in front of us, for instance, with a bird lying on top of it; moving the trail onto the bird triggers the sound of a single piano key and the bird flaps its wings and flies away, its slumber interrupted.

The narrator delivers a monologue recounting how he visited this magical place as a child, getting lost in its splendorous surroundings, when one day a huge creature arrived looking like “a cross between an elephant and a camel, but three times the size.” This large, lumbering, friendly beast then emerges and opens its huge crooked mouth, from which—explains the narrator—music came out of, “of the kind I had never heard before.” Each of the beast’s large pointy teeth activates a different sound, allowing us to jam—creating  an impromptu music piece. It’s a lovely moment. 

One of two lovely moments, in fact, that’ve stayed with me since I first experienced The Turning Forest; the other occurs when we’re placed atop the creature’s back as it glides across a body of water. Red birds fly in the air around us; once activated they make a sound and drop towards the water. Dolphins swim in the water beneath us; once activated they make a sound and jump out of the water. Like I said, it’s lovely. The Turning Forrest has a third location: a winter snow-covered forest, where pointy spear-like icicles are the elements able to be activated. We never have to activate any sounds to keep the experience (which runs for less than 10 minutes) progressing; the narrative continues even if we sit back and do nothing. 

Raby’s approach to establishing narrative tone involved constructing primary and secondary focus points, addressing specific (plot details) and general (tonal details) objectives. I spoke about this with him during an interview conducted for my PHD thesis; Rshared some interesting insights—particularly with regards to the first scene that takes place in the forest, when the creature appears before us. To close out this review, here’s some of what he said. 

 “I was able to mount the visual cues that were pertinent to the narrative, but also secondary to the narrative. I would have a focal point, in terms of the narrative, and a secondary focal point, that could be tonal information—not necessarily what’s happening, but the tone of the moment. So if you’re looking in one particular way, you would get exactly what the voice-over was referring to. But if you look any other way, you would be able to get the narrative tone of that moment.

The most difficult thing was to allow that to happen. To say: what if the user doesn’t look this way? What if the user doesn’t pay attention to this thing the narrative is trying to point out? What do we do with what we deem as the ‘error areas’ or the ‘mistake areas’? Or a better word yet: the ‘equivocal areas’…

That—letting go of the camera control—was a key thing. Up until that point it was the hardest challenge. By doing that you open up the full box, the complex box, the fullest potential the game engine can have. You need to have this person, this agent within the system, as your ally. You need to lure them in—invite them, entice them—and give them enough for them to obtain access to the story, to the gist of what the character is going through. That was a big challenge, which turned into a treasure trove of new narrative approaches.”