My Playtime: 8.6h (100% achievement, finished the game)
Story Mode: 1.4h
Liberation: 4.4h
Grindy Achievement(s): Yes (~2 achievements).
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (14 achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): No.

Gibbon: Beyond the Trees is a game where you play as a gibbon that is hanging from a tree to the next to travel as far as you can. It has three game modes: story mode, Liberation (endless), and daily run.

Pros:
- Great storytelling that tells you the story without words most of the time

Cons:
- Gameplay is too repetitive and boring
- Too much RNG for the Liberation mode

Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

The gameplay is too repetitive and doesn't have a lot to offer.

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Gibbon: Beyond the Trees' visuals might look like 2D, but it's actually 3D, portrayed in a side-scroller view. I like how the game colors the gibbons to make them easy to distinguish. The background also looks great, especially in some areas that portray the environment as a whole.

The story is told without words. You'll see cutscenes with gibbons talking in their native language, which of course you won't understand. That being said, the game left a message not through its story, but rather its presentation. The levels in the story mode tell what happened to the gibbons' home bit by bit, chapter by chapter. It's disheartening to see what their home turns into, especially since it's happening in real life.

Gameplay
Gibbon: Beyond the Trees is an endless game in disguise. You'll traverse the forest with your hands, getting faster as you go, provided that you let go of the branch on time. That's all you need to do: keep on moving without dying. Some areas will require you to avoid burning fire that is located in a small section of the road, some will require you to gain momentum and jump over a cliff, and some will have eagles that can kill you if you get too high in the Liberation mode. Other than those, you should be able to progress safely without anything that can kill you—what matters is just the speed at which you are traveling to move faster.

The controls can take some time to get used to. In order to move the gibbons with their tree-hanging shenanigans, you are equipped with four control schemes: sliding, hanging on a branch, backflip, and dropping down to a lower tree. Hanging from one branch to another will be the fastest way for you to travel, although sliding can give you a good momentum to restart if you fail a jump or if the ground is tilted down. Backflip is there to increase your speed, and the drop-down is just a means to control your position.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2810908571

That being said, it's hard to control your character. You can't use the directional arrows to move your character, so you can only control the character to some extent. However, this can become problematic when you need to make a minute decision, especially since the areas are spawned randomly. Sometimes, you might fall just because you happened to grab on to a branch that leads you to an area with no tree, and if you are unlucky, you might even have to deal with the huge cliff afterwards, meaning that you'll have to restart anyway.

The game goes for the double backflip. You can use backflip several times, and while the first one is easy to get used to, the second one is not. You need to be in a high position to do that, and usually, this also means that the camera will be so stretched out that you can hardly see what the character is currently doing. Unless you have a good eye, you'll miss that timing only because you accidentally trigger the backflip for the third time when you only want to do two.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2812921609

The game was hard to figure out at the beginning. The controls never felt at home to me, and I didn't understand how the double flip works. However, as I got more used to it, the game started to feel repetitive. Even though the story mode separates the levels into chapters with different-looking environments, you still have to do the same thing over and over—no more challenges. This became worse after I finished the story mode and had to continue the Liberation mode.

The Liberation mode will shuffle all areas in the story mode and keep looping it endlessly. Sure, there might be objectives that you can get there, but I hate them since you need to move your character to crash into these objectives whenever possible. Sometimes, you won't be in a good position to get to them, which will rely on RNG since the areas are randomly generated. Moreover, there are just so many objectives you need to do where you just need to do the same thing without new mechanics. It was boring.

Length and Difficulty
I finished the story mode in 1.4h. I then continued with the Liberation mode and finished it in 4.4h. The rest of my playtime was spent getting the remaining achievements. Some achievements might be harder to get, but other than that, the game is pretty easy in general.

Gibbon: Beyond the Trees tells a good message. It encourages you to save the gibbons and provides plenty of information about them. However, the game is very repetitive and boring. It seems as if it tries to extend its playtime without effort. The game seems to work better as an endless game, and although it has that, the objectives and the lack of challenges just make it worse since. Sadly, I can't seem to enjoy playing it, so I'm afraid I can't recommend this game.