A Game About Chopping Trees

I finished A Game About Chopping Trees in a single sitting — 5.9 hours, start to credits on one Saturday — and I’m giving it a 7.5/10. That score is doing a very specific job, so let me be clear about both halves of it: the first loop through this game is genuinely lovely, and the only reason I ever put it down was that it eventually asked me to do the whole thing again.

The pitch is exactly what the title promises. It’s a calm, timer-free game (Space Raccoon Game Studio, out July 2026, about $8 on Steam, playable solo or in online co-op) where you walk up to a tree, chop it down, haul the logs to the sawmill, and spend the wood on becoming better at chopping trees. No combat, no fail state, no clock. Just the very satisfying rhythm of chop, carry, sell, upgrade, repeat — and, quietly underneath it, a map that keeps opening up.

That map is really three places, and walking into each new one was the best part of the ride. You start on the Birch Grove, a small grassy island ringed by water, all windmills and little cabins and easy sightlines. Then the handcar rails carry you into the Oak Forest, a big warm meadow that feels like a sunny afternoon you don’t want to end — the lighthouse sitting out across the valley the whole time, quietly telling you where this is all heading. And then the game shows its hand: the Dark Forest, a snowbound pine valley under a sky full of polar lights. It’s easily the best-looking corner of the game, and rolling into it on the handcar for the first time is the single moment I’d point to if someone asked why this thing is worth $8.

Each area works the same clever way. You clear the ordinary trees to unlock that region’s mother tree, and felling the mother tree is what actually “completes” the place. Do that to the last one in the Dark Forest and its wood repairs the bridge to the lighthouse; walk inside, and the game resets into New Game+. It’s a tidy little loop — the whole game is, fittingly, one big loop about loops.

What kept me chopping was the upgrade board, and I ground the entire thing to MAX (that screenshot is my proof of it). A better axe that eventually becomes a chainsaw, more stamina, grip strength so you can carry more logs per trip, a faster sawmill, a handcar you can soup up, and my favorite: chain felling, where a falling tree can knock the next one over, and the next, until you’ve dropped a whole stand with one swing. Maxed out it goes from a single chain to five, and there’s nothing else in the game as good as lining up a row of pines and watching them all go down like dominoes.

One honest confession about how I played it: I never replanted a single tree. The game lets you plant saplings, and I’m sure that’s the “correct, sustainable” way to engage with it — but it ran completely against my instinct, which was to leave every area a clear-cut wasteland before moving on. So I can’t tell you how the replanting loop feels. I can tell you the game was perfectly happy to let me ignore it, which tells you something about how relaxed it is.

Here’s where the 7.5 comes from. I repaired that bridge, walked into the lighthouse, started New Game+ — and played two full areas of it, purely to finish maxing my upgrades. Somewhere in that second lap the spell broke. The trees come back, but nothing else really changes, and once you’ve felt the whole arc, chopping the same three biomes again is just chopping. That’s not a hidden flaw, either — it’s the common note other players land on too. The game is a wonderful one-time meditation, and asking it to be more than that is where it thins out.

So who is it for? If you want a cozy few-hour game to melt into on a quiet evening — something pretty, low-stakes, and quietly moreish that you finish and feel good about — this is an easy yes, and the co-op means you can hand a friend an axe and clear-cut together. If you’re hoping for a hundred-hour chill-sim to live in, the New Game+ won’t hold you, and you should know that going in.

The receipt says 5.9 hours and 17 of 22 achievements. I stopped chasing the last five for the same reason I stopped playing: by then the game had already given me everything it had, and I was content to leave it there. A lovely loop, three genuinely beautiful places, and a very honest 7.5 — the ride itself is better than that number; the second lap is what keeps it from climbing higher.