Forest Home Review

Developer: The Binary Mill
Price: FREE
Version Reviewed: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5

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Overall Rating:

While it takes a little while to get going, Forest Home is a quite charming puzzle game. The pacing issues are a slight misstep, especially for a free game, but stick with it and you’ll soon be scratching your head in confusion.

Your mission is to guide lost animals back to their homes. Each stage offers a grid based layout and you have to draw colored paths between the animal and their home to safely get them back. Those paths can’t overlap with other creatures’ paths and ideally you want to fill every space on the grid. That’s where things get trickier in Forest Home.

Early on, it’s rarely that awkward though. Each mission usually makes clear sense within a few seconds, but it does get harder. More animals become involved and you also need to guide them to collect food, before returning to their home. Bridges and obstacles also play a role.

It’s fairly satisfying to figure out though and you can use acorns gained in-game to buy hints to help you out. Forest Home is fairly generous on that front, so you won’t have to feel coerced into in-app purchases. You can restart a stage too, changing things around entirely. That change of perspective can sometimes help a lot.

At certain points, you have to unlock extra stages through either asking friends, using acorns, or completing additional puzzles. These puzzles require you to fill all the squares with a strict time limit, and they can be tough. They’re better than feeling tied into paying money to unlock new areas though.

The main issue with Forest Home is that it takes so long to really get going. There’s a surprisingly fiendish selection of puzzles later on, but you’d be forgiven for not realising that initially when each stage feels a little too basic. Pacing problems aside though, and Forest Home is a fun way to spend your time.