Pine
Review

Pine (2019) is an adventure game where you play a primitive young man searching for new land for his tribe. You discover five tribes of anthropomorphic creatures that need to be understood and overcome to enable your tribe to have somewhere to live.

As you progress you learn about the different animal tribes and work with the bartering economy to trade with the different animal tribe vendors and discover new items, armour and weapons.

The novelty is that how the five tribes relate to each other evolves over time. You can influence this to your advantage. Granting a development plan to one tribe will allow them to advance and potentially deal with another tribe for you. Or you can spread rumours of dangerous weather to get tribes to cooperate.

The game is relatively simple to play and works well with younger players, although there may be some help needed in the jumping and climbing aspects. Although the inter-related communities of tribes are kept within the bounds of the story rather than being a fully open simulation, the idea of using influence (and sometimes friendship) rather than aggression to get what you want is a nice twist.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Pine 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 9 months ago.