Hey, fellow fans, I am that handheld nostalgic person who always likes to dig out the GBA and dust it off. I was just wandering around the mobile game area and saw a game called "Little Forest". I thought it was another skin-synthesizing game, but after playing it for a whole night, it turned out to be a bit broken. I still remember when I was a kid, I saved my money for breakfast, ran to the video game store owner, and secretly took out a "yellow card" with "Pokemon Emerald 386" printed on it. When I got home, I inserted it into the SP, and when I turned it on, there was a "ding", and I felt like the whole world belonged to me.
At that time, I didn't know anything about genuine and pirated copies. I only knew that a five-yuan cassette might contain hundreds of hours of adventure, or it might contain a nightmare that would cause the game to lose gear after being turned on three times. There are hundreds of games stuffed into that "combination card", and the names are all pinyin abbreviations. "Sonic" and "Mario Kart" are mixed together. Which one you can play depends on your luck. I still remember that there was a synthesis mini-game hidden in one of the cards, which involved dragging three fruits together to turn them into a big tree and unlocking a new illustrated book. At the time, I thought it was amazing and even more addictive than those action games. Unfortunately, the cassette battery ran out of power, all the archives were lost, and the big tree never grew back.
So when I saw the "classic three-in-one synthetic gameplay" of "Little Forest", my first reaction was: Good guy, isn't this a luxurious and enhanced version of the pirated card game? With a tap of your fingertips, three flowers can be combined into a new flower, and new creatures can be unlocked with different combinations. The illustrations are getting fuller and fuller. The healing feeling is really like building the first wooden house in the pixel forest for the first time when I was a child. It makes my heart melt.
Moreover, this game is not only a simple synthesis, but also filled with many mini-games and dungeon challenges, and the level design is also quite careless. What impresses me the most is its temperament - there is no impatience that forces you to spend money, every picture is like a gentle watercolor painting, and the soundtrack is light and airy. As I play, I think of the nights when I used to lie in bed, staring at the non-luminous screen with the faint light of the desk lamp, relying on a charging cable to stay alive. The pirated cassettes we played at that time had rough graphics, the Chinese versions were all machine-turned, and they would freeze at every turn, but we still enjoyed it because the small world in the game really made people forget about the worries of not finishing their homework.
"Little Forest" is said to be a mobile game, but in fact it is more like a love letter to adults. It perfectly polished the synthetic gameplay that we could only encounter through luck in pirated cassettes, and coupled with the copywriting of "Everyone has his own forest", it instantly made me, an old player, full of emotions. It's free to download, there's no messy “cassette crack” problem, and the archive is always safe, which was something I couldn't even imagine back then.
If you have ever held a hot SP on a rainy day, staring at a screen full of noise and refused to turn it off; if you have ever secretly prayed that the pirated card in your hand would not be lost again, and you are willing to start all over again - then you might as well come and take a seat in "Little Forest". There are flowers, grass, gentle wind, and the dreams we have never finished in those years. Youth seems to be back, even if it is just to find a tree that can keep growing in a small virtual forest, it is worth it.