Late last month, a game called Sons of the Forest launched on the Steam Early Access programme, which allows players to buy unfinished games still in active development, and immediately became one of the biggest new titles of 2023. Within 24 hours, it had sold 2m copies, and it has remained near the top of Steam’s top-sellers list ever since.
Sons of the Forest’s phenomenal success has seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but the momentum has been quietly building for years. Canadian developer Endnight Games has carved out a niche, delivering immersive, tangible and thrilling survival games.
What is Sons of the Forest?
It’s a survival game that throws players into the wilderness and tasks them with staying alive for as long as possible. You play a member of a special forces team sent to track down a missing billionaire and his family on a large, forested island. But after an introductory cutscene that resembles a deleted scene from Predator, your helicopter crashes, scattering your team and leaving you stranded on a beach with most of your hi-tech equipment at the bottom of the ocean.
Like most survival games, Sons of the Forest simulates basic bodily experiences such as hunger, thirst and changing energy levels, alongside weather and temperature. Your immediate goal is to tend to physical needs. You have to locate drinkable water, find food by foraging or hunting animals, and construct a basic shelter where you can sleep. The game features elaborate crafting and building, letting you construct shelters ranging from simple tents to log cabins, and make useful items such as spears and bows to hunt and defend yourself.
This latter point hints at what separates Sons of the Forest from other survival games: Sons of the Forest isn’t just about withstanding the elements. It’s also a horror game, inspired by films such as The Descent and Cannibal Holocaust. The island wilderness is populated by tribes of cannibal mutants, and they’re not thrilled by your arrival. Some live in the forest, periodically visiting your camp, where they may (or may not) attack you. Stranger creatures lurk in subterranean caverns, which happen to be where you’ll find the most useful equipment to help you survive.
Why is it suddenly so popular?
Well, partly because it’s a sequel. In 2014, Endnight Games released The Forest, also on Steam Early Access. The Forest sold more than 5m copies, capitalising on a surge of interest in survival games that peaked in the years after the release of Minecraft, one of the first games to pioneer the idea of gathering resources from the environment and using them to create useful things to survive nights filled with hostile creatures.
And The Forest did two things better than any other survival game. The first was sheer physicality; Endnight was formed by a team of former visual effects artists, with credits on films such as Tron: Legacy and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and that skillset is evident in how convincing the Forest looks and, more importantly, feels. Endnight has a knack for connecting the player with the actual tasks of surviving a wilderness, from building a fire to chopping down trees.
The Forest also excelled as a horror game, thanks to its eerie cannibal tribes. In encounters with the player, they’d display uncannily human behaviours: they could appear curious, show fear when attacked, and would often try to intimidate and deceive the player rather than go for them with a thigh bone. Sons of the Forest builds on all of this, but with a bigger wilderness to explore, even more tactile crafting and building, and friendly characters alongside your mutant adversaries. It also goes even further with its body horror: all manner of unsettling creatures lurk in the woods.
Is the game worth buying now?
That depends. It’s an early access release, meaning it isn’t finished yet. Core systems such as crafting, resource gathering, and combat are fully functional and fun to tinker with, but bugs and glitches are fairly common, ranging from flying corpses to large sections of the island failing to render properly when you load a game. More fundamentally, the island feels sparse and empty, while the current storyline is brief and rudimentary. If you played (and enjoyed) Endnight’s previous game and don’t mind a few rough edges, it’s worth jumping in now. If you haven’t played The Forest, maybe try that first – it’s cheaper, and also finished.
Any tips for beginners?
On your first day in the game, don’t stray too far from your starting point. Search the containers washed up on the beach, then find a nearby spot to construct a basic shelter using two sticks and a tarp. Not only will this give you a place to sleep, but it will also let you save your progress.
Water can be drunk from freshwater sources like rivers, lakes and ponds, which are easy to find using your satellite map. As for food, foraged berries will provide a little sustenance. But the easiest way to sate your hunger is to hunt the seagulls that hover around the starting area. They land frequently and are slow to take off, making them easy targets for your hatchet.
Craft a bow and arrows as soon as you can, as this will help you fend off mutant attacks. Arrows are made with sticks, small stones and feathers, all of which are easy to find. A bow requires sticks, duct tape, and rope. The latter two items cannot be crafted, but you’ll find rolls of duct tape in the containers scattered around the beach, while a length of rope can be found near a pod of beached orcas farther up the shoreline.
Sons of the Forest’s building system is two interlinked systems that work in slightly different ways. One of these lets you build structures freely, placing individual logs, sticks and stones to create fires and shelters. The other lets you place 3D blueprints into the world, then fill those out with the appropriate materials. Pressing “B” will equip your survival handbook, which has instructions for free building and contains blueprints for predesigned structures.
