The Forest Cathedral
How an environmentalist inspired a work of existential dread
Something is wrong with the light. We notice it as we cross the butterfly-filled clearing outside our chalet – a sudden acceleration of the sun, as though hours had passed in a single step. It’s not the only indication that The Forest Cathedral’s lush setting is more than it seems. There’s our handheld scanner, for one thing: this pares the vegetation back to a pixelated crimson gloom, revealing golden lines beneath the soil. There’s our boss, for another: Dr Paul Herman Miller, a real-life Nobel prize winner for his work on the pesticide DDT, here represented as a writhing collage of eyes and lips.
We gather that we are carrying out biological research of some sort, testing bugs and fish for contaminants. Miller tells us to go and check on the fish. To reach their storage area, we must play a game within the game – a deceptively quaint 2D platformer, housed on signboard terminals throughout the forest. Completing levels within the platformer changes the 3D world, as though the two are one environment manifest in different dimensions. Some of these changes are innocuous – connecting a circuit inside the 2D world to power a switch, for example. Others are more alarming. Using a terminal doesn’t block out the background entirely, and the sly movements of distant objects remind us of using the motion tracker in Alien: Isolation.
The Forest Cathedral is not, its creator Brian Wilson promises, a horror game. It’s a psychological thriller with “horror elements”, a distinction that fails to reassure us. The split between a 2D and 3D world owes a debt to the interface puzzles of Stories Untold, but also draws upon Wilson’s college research into human-computer interaction. “We’re so used to looking at a screen while playing a game that we’ve almost over-learned it,” he says. “You’re so locked into that when you’re playing, you don’t necessarily see what’s going on around you. That’s called inattentional blindness.” Wilson’s hope is that playing the platformer will make you more prone to being caught out by alterations in your surroundings. He cites the “invisible gorilla” experiment, in which subjects were asked to watch basketballs being passed around a group. Roughly half were so intent on this that they overlooked the man in a gorilla costume wandering across the scene.
Does The Forest Cathedral contain a gorilla? Wilson doesn’t say. In any case, its strangest ingredient could be its protagonist, real-life biologist Dr Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring (on the effects of pesticides) led to the banning of DDT. The game is an abstract reimagining of the period before the book’s writing, when Carson was a researcher. Wilson came across Silent Spring in college, and feels a kinship with its author. “She grew up not too far outside of Pittsburgh, which is where I live. There are bridges and trails and parks named after her.” Carson’s tale is powerful, he adds, because it’s still being played out. “It’s scary because it’s real. It’s something we’re still being impacted by today. You can’t eat the fish in our local water because of an oil called PCB. Even from 60 years ago, that’s still in the fish.”
The fish we study in the game are all sickly or dead. We’re heading upstream to appraise a living specimen when we see it again – that ominous twisting of the light. The Forest Cathedral wasn’t always this sinister. For a while it was a simple photography sim, inspired by the experience of wandering the countryside. “I was going to make something dark, gritty and really tense. And then by the time I actually started, I was so burnt out from [my previous project] I just couldn’t touch the computer for a while.” It was a reprieve for Wilson, then, but a short-lived one: “Those ideas kind of crept back in.”
Our handheld scanner pares the vegetation back to a pixelated crimson gloom