Majestic Forest is a cute game that looks like it belongs to the SNES era of console gaming. Maybe part of the reason for this interpretation is the fact that the game publisher's name is PiddlePup Games. Whatever the case, the basic premise is that you play as a character that needs to wander through the eponymous forest to discover what happened to the Forest Mother, who is missing. What this means is that you'll traverse 60 levels of item-collection action to arrive at the end, wherein presumably you'll learn the answer to the mystery.

In practice, what Majestic Forest is is a puzzler on the order of those types of games that have a particular solution that can only be solved one way. The key to these kinds of games lies in fully understanding the mechanics of the pieces on the board, so to speak, and the underlying philosophy behind the puzzles. Here's how it works.

At the beginning of the game, you have the choice to select one of six characters: two male humans, two female humans, and two creatures of indeterminate gender. There doesn't appear to be any real functional distinction between any of them, so it's just a matter of aesthetics. Once chosen, your character is plopped down into the middle of a well-tended, grassy checkerboard field bordered by impassable hedges. The goal of each level is to collect a given number of magical talismans -- colorful shapes with no otherwise important meaning -- to open the door of a nearby cottage, the entering of which leads to the next level.

What stands in the way of achieving this goal are a number of things. First, the environmental barriers. From the aforementioned hedges to waterways to impassable thorny bushes, each level is constructed in such a way as to require the player to plot out a course to gather each talisman, if each talisman is not immediately accessible. One of the more frequent ways in which the levels are constructed is by the use of bodies of water with talismans in the middle of the land mass, or a path to the cottage that is interrupted by a water way.

An element that's important to learn how to manage properly is the ubiquitous boulder. Your character can push a boulder around a level as long as there is a space to push it into. Manipulation of a boulder is effected by moving your character up to the boulder and pushing against it until it meets a barrier, or sinks into water. Once in water, it is immovable, but it can be walked upon. In this way, talismans can be reached over bodies of water. However, boulders cannot be pulled; this is to say, once pushed into a niche where there is no room to get to the other side of a boulder, there the boulder remains. At this point, the only option the player has is to restart the level. Boulders can also destroy otherwise impassable thorn bushes, an important element to keep in mind.