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The Forest: Trees, Lakes and 300 km/h
At 4,000 metres the country road you have been sharing with tractors simply stops. The asphalt runs a few metres onto the grass and ends between two log barriers, and in front of you is a wide, dim meadow walled in by pines on both sides. No lanes, no traffic, nobody coming the other way. Everything on the field stands perfectly still, and every bit of it is lethal. It is the quietest scene in Brakeless, and at the speed you will be doing by the time it gets thick, one of the least forgiving.
The Forest at a glance
| Starts | 4,000 m, where the Countryside road ends |
|---|---|
| Ends | 5,000 m, swallowed by a black hole into the Void |
| The ground | An open grass field about as wide as the eight-lane Bridge, with no markings. Walls of pines at both edges keep you on it. |
| What moves | Nothing except you |
| What kills you | Trees, boulder piles, fallen logs, stump clusters, dead snags, the occasional parked car at a lakeside — and the lakes themselves |
| Difficulty phase | Terminal Velocity — its banner arrives a few hundred metres in, as the speedometer pins at 300 km/h |
| Close calls | Anything standing on the grass counts; lakes don't |
What the chase camera shows you
The field rolls out under a soft green haze. Obstacles come out of that haze a long way ahead and sharpen as they approach, so the first thing to train is where you look: at the far edge of the clear ground, not at your own bumper.
Most of what you dodge is trees — round broadleaves, dark conifers — but some of the obstacles are not trees at all: a cluster of mossy boulders, a log lying across the grass, a group of stumps, a bare dead snag. Treat them all alike. If it stands up off the ground, it is solid. The flat things are not: bare dirt patches, drifts of fallen leaves and rings of red-capped mushrooms are just texture on the grass, and you can drive straight over them. Further out, in the tree line itself, you will now and then pass a campsite with a tent and someone at a barbecue. That is scenery beyond the edge of the field, and nothing there can reach you.
Lakes are dark water set into a muddy bank. Some have a wooden jetty with people on a bench, or a swimmer standing waist-deep, and some have a car parked at the shore. That car is the only one you will meet in the forest, and it is exactly as solid as the tree it is standing in for. The water is lethal too. One thing about lakes is always true: they lie against one side of the field, leaving the other side open.
Reading a field instead of traffic
Everything you learned in the first four scenes was about predicting other drivers: blinkers, closing speeds, the queue behind a truck. In the forest there is nothing to predict. What you see in the haze is exactly what will be there when you arrive. That changes the job from reacting to planning, and it is why the how-to-play guide says small corrections beat big swerves here.
There are also no lanes. You are not choosing between four strips of tarmac; you are threading gaps between trunks, and a gap can be anywhere. Trees arrive in loose rows of one to three across the field, spaced out at first and closing up the deeper you go. Every row leaves room. The skill is choosing a gap in the next row that you can reach from the gap you are in now.
That reach is smaller than it feels. Your car steers sideways at the same rate at 300 km/h as it did leaving the city, and at 300 km/h you cover about 83 metres every second. You cannot cross the whole field in the time it takes a tree that has just appeared out of the haze to reach you. Pick gaps close to your current line and drift between them. A tap of the key in the 3D game is a small nudge; holding it builds to full lock in a fraction of a second, so keep taps for trimming and holds for real moves.
One more detail of the picture: a broadleaf's outer leaves spread wider than the trunk and the thick heart of the crown. Brushing the very edge of the foliage is survivable; aiming at the leaves to be safe from the trunk is not a plan.
How to drive it
- Look two rows ahead. The row in front of you is already decided. Use it to set up the row behind it, so each move is a short slide rather than a lunge.
- Commit early when you see water. A big lake can reach past the middle of the field. The moment you see one, move to the open side; trees still stand there, so you want the time to pick your way through them.
- Use the edges as a backstop, not a lane. The pine walls hold you on the field, and sliding along one does not crash you. But a tree near the edge with the wall beside it leaves you only one way round it — usually the long way.
- Coins are proper relief here. Trees are spaced along the ground, so any speed a coin takes off is extra time between rows, and Terminal Velocity never lets a coin drop you below 120 km/h. Take one when it is on your line or one short slide away. A coin that needs a swerve through a row is a tree with a prize on top.
- Shave trees for the shield. With no traffic, trees and the other standing obstacles are your only source of close calls, and each skim charges the meter one notch. Lakes never count. The rows give a steady supply, so you can keep the meter alive with a skim every few rows without hunting dangerous ones.
- Spend the ghost late, and land it in grass. The field is at its thickest over the last few hundred metres before 5,000 m, which is the best place to burn a shield. A ghost passes through trees and water alike, but it ends with a blink; use that blink to steer into an open gap so you are not inside a trunk when the car turns solid again.
The way in and the way out
The arrival is gentle. The country road runs out, the field opens to both sides, and the first rows are sparse, which gives you a stretch to settle into the field before the speedometer reaches its 300 km/h maximum. From there the woods thicken steadily until the end.
At 5,000 m no new trees appear. Instead a black hole rises over the far end of the field — a bright ring of light around a black core, with glowing red eyes and a jagged grin — and swells as you close on it. The trees already on the field are still solid, so keep steering until the dark covers the screen. Then you lose the wheel: the hole drags the car to the centre, everything goes black, and you come out in open space with thrusters lit. The Void guide picks it up from there, and the science page covers what a real black hole would do.
Forest questions
Are there any cars in the Brakeless forest?
No moving ones. The forest is the first scene with no traffic at all. The only car you will see is parked beside a lake, and it kills you exactly like a tree.
Can you drive through the lakes in Brakeless?
Not without a ghost shield. The water is lethal, and skimming a lake does not count as a close call. Lakes always sit against one edge of the field, so the answer is to be on the other side early.
Why is the Forest harder than the Countryside?
Two reasons arrive together: your speed tops out at 300 km/h a few hundred metres in, and there is no traffic to follow or hide behind. Every gap is one you have to find yourself, at the speed you will hold for the rest of the run.