LLast month, a game called Sons of the Forest was released on the Steam Early Access program, which allows players to purchase unfinished games still in active development, and it immediately became one of the biggest new titles of 2023. In Within 24 hours, it had sold 2 million copies, and has remained near the top of Steam’s best-seller list ever since.
The phenomenal success of Sons of the Forest seemed to appear out of nowhere, but momentum has been quietly building for years. Canadian developer Endnight Games has carved a niche for itself, offering immersive, tangible and exciting survival games.
What is Children of the Forest?
It is a survival game that throws players into the wilderness and tasks them with staying alive for as long as possible. You are a member of a special forces team sent to locate a missing billionaire and his family on a large, forested island. But after an introductory scene that resembles a deleted scene from Predator, your helicopter crashes, scattering your team and leaving you stranded on a beach with most of your high-tech gear on the ocean floor.
Like most survival games, Sons of the Forest simulates basic bodily experiences such as hunger, thirst, and changes in energy levels, along with weather and temperature. Your immediate goal is to attend to physical needs. You have to locate drinking water, find food by searching for food or hunting animals, and build a basic shelter where you can sleep. The game features elaborate crafting and construction, allowing you to build shelters ranging from simple tents to log cabins, and craft useful items like spears and bows for hunting and defense.
This last point hints at what separates Sons of the Forest from other survival games: Sons of the Forest is not just about withstanding the elements. It’s also a horror game, inspired by movies like The Descent. and cannibal holocaust. The island’s desert is populated by tribes of cannibalistic mutants, and they are not excited about your arrival. Some live in the forest, periodically visiting your camp, where they may (or may not) attack you. Strange creatures lurk in underground caverns, which are where you’ll find the most useful gear 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 5 million copies, taking advantage of a surge in interest in survival games that peaked in the years after the release of Minecraft, one of the first games to pioneer the idea of harvesting resources from the environment and use them to create useful things to survive nights full of hostile creatures.
And The Forest did two things better than any other survival game. The first was pure physicality; Endnight was built by a team of former visual effects artists, with credits on movies like Tron: Legacy and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and that skill set is evident in how convincing the Forest looks and, what’s more, important, it feels Endnight has the ability to connect the player with the real tasks of survival in the wild, from making fire to cutting down trees.
The Forest also stood out as a horror game, thanks to its creepy cannibalistic tribes. In encounters with the player, they displayed amazingly human behaviors: they could appear curious, show fear when attacked, and would often try to intimidate and trick the player instead of attacking them with a femur. Sons of the Forest builds on all of this, but with a larger wilderness to explore, even more tactile crafting and building, and friendly characters alongside your mutant adversaries. It also goes further with its body horror: all sorts of disturbing creatures lurk in the woods.
after newsletter promotion
Is it worth buying the game now?
It depends. It’s an early access release, which means it’s not finished yet. The basic systems like crafting, resource gathering, and combat are fully functional and fun to play, but bugs and glitches are quite common, from flying corpses to large sections of the island not rendering correctly when you load a game. game. More fundamentally, the island feels sparse and empty, while the current history is brief and scrappy. If you played (and enjoyed) the previous Endnight game and don’t mind some rough edges, it’s worth jumping in now. If you haven’t played The Forest, maybe try that first – it’s cheaper and it’s finished too.
Any advice for beginners?
-
On your first day in the game, don’t stray too far from your starting point. Search the bins washed up on the beach, then find a spot nearby to build a basic shelter out of two poles and a tarp. This will not only give you a place to sleep, but it will also allow you to save your progress.
-
The water can be drunk from freshwater sources such as rivers, lakes, and ponds, which are easy to find using your satellite map. As for food, the collected berries will provide a bit of sustenance. But the easiest way to satisfy 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 axe.
-
Craft a bow and arrows as soon as you can, as this will help you defend against mutant attacks. Arrows are made from sticks, small stones, and feathers, all of which are easy to find. A bow requires sticks, tape, and string. The last two items can’t be crafted, but you’ll find rolls of duct tape in the bins strewn across the beach, while a piece of rope can be found near a pod of stranded orcas further up the coast.
-
The Sons of the Forest building system is two interconnected systems that work in slightly different ways. One of these allows you to build structures freely, placing individual logs, sticks, and stones to create fires and shelters. The other allows you to place 3D blueprints in the world and then fill them in with the appropriate materials. Pressing “B” will equip your survival manual, which has instructions for free building and contains blueprints for pre-built structures.
