Forager brings its unique mix of farming, crafting, and dungeon crawling to mobile devices, and it's a game that is well-suited to mobile gaming that's bogged down by a couple of frustrating issues. Forager, from one-man studio HopFrog, charmed players with its cute pixel art aesthetic and combination of mechanics when it released on PC and consoles last year.
Forager's first minutes are rough compared to what follows. The player starts on a small island with a pickaxe, with little instruction on what to do. Resources such as trees, rocks, and berry bushes will randomly sprout on the island to be collected and refined into new tools, workshops, and coins to purchase new islands. It's immediately reminiscent of titles such as Minecraft, with its resource gathering and strategic decisions making up the order of operations: should the player build a shovel or a sword first? Forge gold ingots to make coins, or save them to make steel? Working towards these small goals is the bulk of the early gameplay, and can be a little frustrating when a recipe is two iron ingots away from completion and no iron appears, but at any given time there are always a few projects to work toward, especially as more islands are opened up and dungeons can be explored.
By far the most frustrating thing about Forager, at least on iOS, is dying. Upon death, a "Game Over" screen flashes and the app resets to the company logos and then main menu, as if the game was just opened. There's no way to skip any of this. What's more confusing is the save can be loaded back, and the autosave is very generous. So why the tedious restart after a death? If anything, it forces the player to be extra cautious in battle as the wait time is worse than any in-game punishment. While the touch controls work mostly without a hitch, there are times where the targeting reticle is a little unpredictable in compact quarters, but this rarely has severe consequences.
Those frustrations aside, Forager's gameplay is ideal for a mobile device, as it works across different lengths of time. A few minutes can be killed mining or harvesting crops, while half an hour can be whittled away setting up defenses. It's quite possible to spend hours blasting through dungeons or hunting for items to fill out the museum, too. While it could do with a little more of a tutorial in the opening, Forager's depth as the game goes on is impressive as the player goes from poking at slimes with a pickaxe to fighting skeleton armies with a demon sword. This has been made possible by constant big updates, in the same vein of some of its inspirations like Stardew Valley, which is still getting new content years after release, or Minecraft, which recently got new biomes and enemies.
Forager gets off to a slow start where every death gives the player time to consider playing something else. There's no story or definite goal beyond unlocking all the islands, and it asks the player to create their own goals and stick through the rocky start and tedious restarts. That patience is rewarded with an engaging mixture of farming, crafting, mining, and combat mechanics, however, and is well-suited to mobile devices. Forager is an excellent fit on phones, even if the execution has some issues, and it's worth a look for those who want something more involved on their mobile device.
Forager is out now on iOS. It is also available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was given an App Store code for the purposes of this review.