The Forest 1.12 — Mac version

If you have spent hours in a crafting menu building a base in a blocky sandbox, The Forest feels like its dark, grown-up cousin. Instead of night-time zombies, you get cannibals and mutant creatures who watch you from the treeline before striking. It is a first-person survival horror experience built around gathering resources, crafting tools and staying alive through the night.

Wineskin build plays smoothly on M1 and M2 through Rosetta 2

The macOS version arrives as a Wineskin build, labeled 1.12. It runs on Apple Silicon machines through Rosetta 2. Frame rates stay playable on an M1 or M2 chip at medium settings, though dense forest areas with lots of shadows can cause dips. The open world stretches across forests, muddy coasts, abandoned camps and deep underground caves, so expect the fan to kick in during cave exploration where lighting calculations pile up.

Controls and co-op

Keyboard and mouse controls are tight for a survival game. Crafting pulls you into a physical mat where you combine sticks, rocks and cloth by dragging them together, no grid menus. The cooperative mode lets you bring a friend into the same world, which changes the feel entirely. Building a log cabin while someone keeps watch with a bow turns the horror into something closer to teamwork under pressure. Cannibals adapt to your behaviour, so a co-op pair who build loudly near a patrol route will see more visitors than a solo player hiding in the cliffs.

Drop grass render distance so crouched cannibals can't hide

Before you even pick up a stick, open the options menu and turn grass render distance down a notch. Tall grass hides rabbits and lizards but it also masks cannibals crouching a few metres away. Lowering it makes the early game less jumpy without spoiling the look.

Switch crouch toggle on if you have not already. Stealth matters hugely when you are scouting a camp for supplies and your hands are already busy on the movement keys. While you are there, bump field of view up to around 75 or 80. The default feels cramped inside caves, where threats come from side passages.

Run the Fix file when a macOS update breaks the wrapper launch

The biggest headache is the Wineskin wrapper refusing to launch after a macOS update. If the icon bounces once and nothing happens, mount the disk image again and run the Fix file. It resets the wrapper's permissions and path references. Nine times out of ten that is all it needs.

Another odd one: the game sometimes opens to a black screen with audio playing. This usually means the resolution set in the options does not match your display. Hold Cmd+Return after launch to force windowed mode, then reset the resolution from the graphics menu. If you are playing on an external monitor, disconnect it before first launch, set your preferences, then plug it back in.

On some M-series machines the cursor drifts slightly during inventory management. Lowering mouse smoothing to zero in the control settings fixes it immediately. The crafting mat becomes far less fiddly once the cursor stops overshooting.

• Build labeled 1.12 [Wineskin], released 30 April 2018.

• macOS (Wineskin build, Apple Silicon supported).