Extra traps, steadier rulesin Trees Hate You's demo

A tree steals a top hat, moves it out of reach, and another tree thumps the owner as they leave. That's the sequence Gaming.net's Jord Tury describes from the Trees Hate You demo. The forest has time for petty theft as well as murder. Yet behind that cheerful nastiness sits a surprisingly considerate replay option: Challenge Mode adds traps while making the run more predictable.

Tykenn's game is due on PC on 16 November, a date confirmed in its August announcement and current official FAQ. Before then, the Steam demo offers a useful look at how this woodland joke works on a second visit. Its normal run introduces the ambushes; completing it unlocks a mode whose documented rules give you a better chance to learn a route, even as the route grows more hazardous.

The ambush has already happened

The developer's April demo announcement sets out three changes. Every trap is present from the start and stays unchanged when you respawn. Certain random events are seeded to make their behaviour more predictable. Extra traps appear throughout the levels, making some manoeuvres harder. That is a more interesting combination than simply increasing the number of things waiting to hit you. The additional obstacles arrive alongside firmer information about what the next attempt will contain.

Take the respawn rule. Returning to an unchanged set of traps means a failed attempt can inform the next route through that same arrangement. You still have to get past the hazards; the game hasn't promised to make them harmless. But it has removed changes to the trap setup after death. The forest can be vicious without requiring you to discover a different arrangement each time you return to it.

The seeded events work towards the same purpose, with an important limit: Tykenn says certain random events become more predictable. That doesn't establish that every event is identical on every run, or that the whole game is deterministic. It does describe a replay built to reduce some uncertainty. The developer explicitly presents the mode as better suited to speedrunning, where learning what comes next can be as valuable as moving quickly.

Keep the insult, change the task

The hat sequence in Tury's review shows why a normal visit and a practised return have different attractions. A branch withholding your new accessory is a small, spiteful performance. Once you've seen the gag, its surprise is spent. Challenge Mode offers another reason to revisit these woods: work out how to pass the hazards under steadier rules. That reading follows the developer's changes; it doesn't require the same prank to be funny indefinitely.

Extra traps give that return some work of its own. Finishing the normal demo unlocks the mode, but the added hazards mean there are still obstacles you haven't negotiated on that first trip. Familiarity is a start, rather than a complete solution. Tykenn doesn't identify every addition in the announcement, so there's no basis for claiming a particular shortcut is blocked or a favourite route has been rewritten.

Later demo adjustments make the invitation to practise more concrete. A timer and death counter appear at the end of a run, and can be enabled on the HUD through Settings. Those are two useful measures for a replay: how long the trip took and how often it ended badly. Neither proves a competitive scene exists, but both let a player compare their own attempts without having to keep a separate tally.

A little mercy before the tree-for-fall

The same update added a checkpoint near the end of the first level, just before the obstacle Tykenn calls the tree-for-fall. The developer identified a long stretch without a checkpoint between the hill and the level's end. It also added more traps to offset that mercy. Even the convenience arrives with an elbow in the ribs: less ground to repeat in that stretch, with more trouble still waiting along the way.

The August announcement says development has added tree types, traps and secrets away from the main path, while keeping late-game details under wraps. November's complete forest remains to be explored. The demo already supplies the more revealing detail, though. A game devoted to catching you out has a replay mode that holds its trap arrangement still long enough for practice to count. You can return knowing more, and still have plenty to dodge.