Like many survival horror games, The Forest features a parent searching for a missing child in horrifying surroundings. The Forest's gameplay may lean more heavily into the survival aspect than other survival horror titles, but it has plenty of grotesque and horrifying monsters to keep the horror element alive. Since Silent Hill, the lone parent searching for a child has become a staple of the genre, as well as becoming a trend in gaming more broadly. With more and more games exploring the relationship between parent and child, many horror games have moved into exploring more complex stories around parenthood, as is the case with The Forest and Timmy's eventual fate.
Many franchises like The Last of Us, Bioshock, and Telltale's The Walking Dead explore the loss of the parental figure. While there is often a great threat to the child character in these games, they usually end up surviving. The Forest turns this on its head by giving the player a major choice that will affect both the ending and Timmy's fate. The game takes inspiration from the likes of Cannibal Holocaust and The Descent, so naturally, the narrative is dark, bloody, and challenging. The fate of Timmy is made even darker by the fact that the playable character is his father, Eric, and so the final choice is given enormous weight. While The Last of Us posed the question of how far would a person go to protect their child (whether adoptive or not), The Forest emphasizes that there may be a line that is too morally objectionable to pass.
Timmy's Significance
In games that explore parent/child relationships, the child must often be protected or rescued from violent forces (especially in survival horror). As such, in many ways, the child is the main motivating factor of the game, and protecting or rescuing them is "winning" the game. As games become increasingly morally complex, this idea has been complicated, but at the game's beginning, the main goal is to rescue Timmy from mysterious and monstrous mutants. The plane crash and Timmy's kidnapping are the catalysts for the action in the game, and finding Timmy serves as the player's main motivation. Timmy is even the one leaving clues for Eric to find, driving the narrative to its eventual conclusion.
In searching for Timmy, the player will eventually explore a deserted underground lab belonging to Sahara Therapeutics to discover the identity of Timmy's kidnapper. Dr. Matthew Cross, a former researcher at the lab, kidnaps Timmy in order to sacrifice him to an artifact known as the Resurrection Obelisk in order to resurrect his deceased daughter. As such, grieving and distressed parents play both protagonist and antagonist in this game. Timmy's scattered drawings that lead the player to find him imply that Timmy is still alive, but unfortunately by the time Eric finds him, Timmy has already been sacrificed to the Obelisk. Eric finds Cross dead, and also witnesses Cross's daughter transform into a cannibalistic monster, having been revived by Obelisk which requires a living, child sacrifice.
Timmy's Ultimate Fate
It is very often said that losing a child is the worst pain a person can experience, and The Forest puts players into this unimaginable situation but in a totally surrealist setting. Eric discovers another artifact, the Power Obelisk, which functions like an EMP device and can bring down planes. Therefore, the implication is that this is exactly what Cross did, and the player, as Eric, must choose whether to repeat his actions in the hope of reviving his son. There are two distinct endings from this point, based on whether the player chooses to use the Obelisk or not, and neither of them can really be considered a "good" ending. Instead, The Forest presents two challenging scenarios.
If the player chooses to use the Obelisk and crash the plane, it is then implied that he kidnaps a child himself and resurrects Timmy. The game skips to a year later, in which Eric and Timmy are appearing on a talk show. Eric is promoting a book he's written based on his experiences on the peninsula, but suddenly Timmy begins to convulse in the same way Cross' daughter, Megan, did before she mutated. However, Eric comforts him and the game skips forward years and shows an older, more hardened Timmy. It becomes clear Timmy is searching for the mysterious peninsula from his youth, while also suppressing physical mutations similar to Megan's, implying he is affected by the Obelisk but has it under control for the time being.
The other ending shows Eric burning a photo of Timmy, and then choosing to remain isolated on the peninsula. While this ending is rather somber, it doesn't require Eric to sacrifice another child. Similar to a common theme across a variety of horror media, Eric ultimately destroys the photo of Timmy as his last connection to his former life and embraces the madness of the peninsula. The player gets to continue playing the game, but Timmy can never be revived, and so the narrative becomes one about a man driven to insanity after the loss of his child.
Of course, the other ending is hardly a happy one, either. Though it is not shown explicitly, the implication that Eric kidnapped and killed a child to rescue Timmy is a heavy burden for them both to bear. Since it's clear Timmy has been affected by the Obelisk, then it becomes unclear whether this choice was better for Timmy or for Eric. In this respect, the game presents very difficult emotional scenarios and gives players the opportunity to choose the best path themselves.
It's not clear just yet who will feature in the sequel game Sons of the Forest, but it is possible the playable character could be an older Timmy, which makes the choice to save him the canonical one. The name of the sequel is of particular interest since it features the word "sons", but it may be an entirely new story with similar themes. What is certain is that the sequel will be as bloody and grotesque as the first game, and will likely present its players with some equally difficult moral choices.
The Forest is available now on PC and PS4.