Links for Me: Tale of Tales

Tale of Tales: The Endless Forest

The Endless Forest is an online game, played mostly through a screen saver, that deals with simple exploration, communication, and looking at the world created for you. There are several different scenes (one humorously based off a Doctor Who item, which gets props from me), and your main objective is to walk around and enjoy them. You can do deer-like things, but the game presents no objectives for you to accomplish.

Communication in the game is minimal - you are limited to what you can convey in your deer form. Gender is irrelevant, as everyone is required to play a male deer - because "antlers are pretty," they say, but it is mostly to make you communicate as a deer, not as your gender counterpart.

Aside from the deer characters of this game bearing a creepy resemblance to the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, this game is a pretty good match for the exploration side of our game - exploring for the sake of seeing what is out there. Minimalizing communication by limiting the player to a specific form is an interesting concept - making them communicate by action and emotion, rather than words, could be a concept we could use in our space exploration game. This game definitely warrants more exploration.