Forestia is a 1998 Edutainment Game where you explore a forest in the style of Myst. It was made in French but has been dubbed into several languages including English, Dutch, Finnish, German and Italian. Major characters include Sam, a rabbit serving as your guide and companion, and Daddyoak, an old wise tree.
There are 9 chapters total, playing in random order. At the start of each you're given a mission, and they range from crafting a painting as a birthday gift to Daddyoak, to navigating an ant colony while shrunk, to stopping an evil sorcerer from destroying the forest in a horrific alternate timeline.
Tropes include:
- 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Inverted; most of the game is prerendered 3D but the characters are usually 2D sprites.
- Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: While inside the ant colony, you have to swap between two disguises according to the type of insect soldier approaching you, so that they don't capture you. You have only a few seconds to react but changing the costume happens in an instant.
- Collection Sidequest: You collect plants, mushrooms and photos of animals that can be found all over the forest. Most animals only appear at certain times of day and finding them all is a real challenge.
- Fairy Ring: The mushrooms in one must be rearranged to dispel the magic of the fairies troubling inhabitants of the forest.
- Featureless Protagonist: The game treats you, the player, as the protagonist.
- Floating Continent: The entirety of Forestia is situated on an island that floats in the air, replete with Waterfall into the Abyss. It is never specified if it is just a floating landmass on top of a normal world, or if it's a World in the Sky made entirely of floating landmasses.
- Incredible Shrinking Man: The secret agent chapter involves you drinking a magic potion to shrink yourself before you can enter the ant colony.
- Magic Mushroom: These play a big role in one chapter, "The Enchanted Mushrooms". You and various forest animals become brightly recoloured with spots after touching ones lying around, and you undo the affliction by arranging mushrooms in a Fairy Ring correctly.
- Or Was It a Dream?: Right after completing the quest involving a dragon and returning to normal Forestia, Sam tells you dragons don't exist and that you were only dreaming. But then a dragon flies in the sky...
- Our Sirens Are Different: In the siren's chapter, everyone in the forest but you is hypnotised by the siren's song. They are just standing still with swirling eyes.
- Red Filter of Doom: The nightmare in the Fire Mountain chapter has the entire forest tinted in a frightening blood red tone while a dark choir sings a non-stop, low note
. - Surprisingly Creepy Moment: 8 out of the 9 scenarios are lighthearted fun. But the exception is The Fire Mountain chapter, which is like straight out of a Lovecraftian fever dream of a Creepypasta. It begins normally, with Sam inviting you to look at constellations in the wooden tower, after which he promptly goes to sleep. Then, just like that, you awaken in hell. Everything is tinted a searing bright red, an ominous choir sings a neverending low drone, your cute animal and tree friends are found motionless around the forest, with their souls floating off their bodies, a dragon explains to you an insane wizard has awakened a volcano to annihilate everything...
- That Cloud Looks Like...: One chapter involves competing with Sam about who is the faster one to identify and draw animals from clouds. The clouds glide across the screen and conspicuously stop midway, morph into animal shapes and back, and then go on their merry way.
- World in the Sky: See Floating Continent above.
