The First Tree

Every now and then you stumble across the 'Best Deals' part of the Nintendo Switch search results and you might stumble upon a gem, or you might come across this game. First of all, 'The First Tree' is not a game at all, it's an interactive story where you use a 'fox' which has no name, to travel through Alaska (they claim it's Eagle River, a city north of Anchorage) and it's impossible to die.

The game aspect is a joke, you can fly against walls, stick to creatures and you don't need to do anything challenging to reach the end. There's even the idea where you find these butterfly power-ups that you don't need, and even hearing the commentary the guy admits it was a 'good idea' he thought of, and never used it again.

You travel along this journey in a sandbox like environment, and if you waste time to get all the checkpoints you get to hear all the recordings of some husband and wife talking. There is a point where another game was mentioned, but it was just to sell another product he worked on.

The only time you're required to do something in this game, is with these rocks you stand on, and there's 3 of them in this poorly designed level. First of all, I think this game designer mistaken a fox for a coyote or wolf, which is the worst aspect of this game because it took me 10 minutes to figure out you have to stand on it a certain way and press a button, but I guess it doesn't matter when you've got a 'game' for sale.

Before I get into spoilers, the stupid part about this game was when I found out you couldn't die, because I was treading carefully throughout the time I played. Then I'm like, screw it, and did a leap thinking I was going to die and there's a pause, because you're expecting to die, but you don't.

So you're this invincible character, traveling along this sandbox like environment, you stick to creatures, you don't need to do anything challenging to reach the end. This is exactly the problem with this 'game', too many people are designing these interactive stories and passing them off as games.

There's no complex level design, you can't die, and you have unlimited running. It's strange, because when I reached the level where you capture butterflies (you walk or jump into them) I thought it would be much more complicated with the storyline, but this game is a joke.

You could tell there was a swimming ability, which he mentioned, and it's almost as if he was going to design a game, but that would take a team to test it out. Why bother adding anything that would make this a game, may as well sell it as the product it is.

Here's the game, you're a female fox (vixen) and you travel alone this guy's made up story, you find your dead babies and can't be killed. Soon as you find the second dead baby, you continue following this wolf and eventually you come across this big tree and it's basically the end.

You end up in a house (all boxed up and ready to go), where you control a male character, leave said house and end up in a tent. Then you run after a wolf, and that's the end.

The graphics are trash, if you want all the sparkle things you're going to waste hours traveling through a crappy environment, and the moral of this story is, the creator of the game rushed this project. It would have made more sense to plan a coyote over a fox, but I guess they designed a fox character to reach these goals, the butterfly aspect was tried and given up on, but howling on a crappy rock was added when foxes don't howl.

I tried to like this game, even listening to all the commentary to see where the game designer was going with his theory, but it was a waste of time. In all seriousness, this isn't a game, it's an interactive story, and not a very good one.

This should be freeware.