The decision by Endnight to forego a full release (and inevitable delay) of the sequel to The Forest, Sons of the Forest, in favor of launching it as a beta back in late February might have been a slight cause for concern for some, but a few hours of gameplay was enough to quell any worries we might have had.
Sons of the Forest starts with an abundance of familiarity with its predecessor. You Crash from the sky onto an island, and it’s made clear quickly that you aren’t alone and that your survival will depend on your ability to provide resources and protection against some rather unpleasant… inhabitants. This time, however, you’re given one NPC helper in the form of a fellow crash victim who suffers an unfortunate head injury that leaves him rather helpless other than the ability to follow fundamental orders. This feature was a very welcome surprise. The nature of The Forest means that you’re left to a lot of redundancy like collecting sticks, chopping trees, collecting pebbles, etc., for your various building and crafting projects. Kelvin, your NPC helper, can be ordered to do all that for you and even more. This means you can spend your time doing more things you find attractive in this fairly open-ended world Endnight has created.
Gameplay in Sons of the Forest:
As you wander the island, you’ll no doubt meet the locals. Like The Forest, they seem to belong to different factions with different motives, tactics, and physical characteristics. Without spoiling anything, it’ll be up to you to discover which cannibal faction presents the most significant threat and how best to deal with each. Enemies will scamper up trees, hide in bushes, or watch you from a distance before walking up calmly to take a swing at you.
All Equally terrifying.
They must have perfected the algorithm to know when your guard is as far down as possible before spawning a cannibal at your back to scream in your ear. One minute you’re watching a moose sit on a rock overlooking a beautiful vista from the mountain to where the sky becomes the sea; the next you’re being ambushed and dragged off to be strung up in some cannibal tribe’s camp. Don’t let the forest fool you, moments of peace end as quickly as they begin and cannibals aren’t the only danger out there.
The actual fighting in Sons of the Forest feels pretty good with just the right amount of indie dev. Charm. Hitboxes can be strange, and movement feels clunky sometimes, but I see this as more of a feature than a bug. It makes battles chaotic and frantic. It somehow more realistically emulates how a scenario like this might play out and makes every encounter tense and startling.
The game gives you plenty of different weapons to experiment with, many of which you will find through exploration but some of which you can craft yourself. This makes combat feel varied and when it gets a little stale, you find a new toy to play with.
Building in Sons of the Forest:
Base building is the main underpinning of the gameplay loop in Sons of the Forest. As you accumulate resources, you’ll need a place to store them and to sleep through the night safely. Endnight has curated a surprisingly open-ended building mechanic that lets you live out your remote island log cabin fantasies. There’s still a lot of work to be done by the developers here, though.
If the jank of the combat feels charming, the jank of the building can be downright frustrating when all you want to do is build your dream mansion in the woods. However, it can be done with some engineering, albeit with a few modifications to your original plan.
It should also be noted that there are predefined structures you can place that will mostly “build themselves” if engaging with the building mechanic isn’t up your alley. I would encourage you to give it a shot, though. Getting lost in an extravagant idea that takes hours to complete just to make your life slightly more accessible is a worthy distraction from fighting, looting, and foraging.
Performance in Sons of the Forest:
This is the biggest area that could be improved in Sons of the Forest. I and my co-op buddies have what you’d quickly call top-of-the-line PCs, and in many areas, it just struggled to run at an acceptable level. Even on an RTX4090. So much so that we had to choose where to build our base because the beauty of the scenery would drop our performance too much. Adding large structures exasperates the issue. This particular problem persisted regardless of settings, so even if you have the best PC known to man, you will still get these frame rate dips and stutters.
I have confidence Endnight will continue to optimize just like they did after the release of The Forest. It should also be noted that if you have a Gsync-compatible display, it can make a big difference in playability.
The story in Sons of the Forest:
The story in Sons of the Forest is even more present than it is in its predecessor, but to get the most out of it you will still need to be quite the detective and have the patience to scour the island without a whole lot of direction.
If you can manage that, there’s quite a bit of intrigue to be found, and it makes you want to continue through to the end to see what the hell is happening on this island and where the hell do all these golf balls fit into it?
Conclusion:
Sons of the Forest is more than a worthy Sequel to what is, in my opinion, one of the best survival horror games ever made. It keeps what was great about the first while adding just enough to keep veteran players interested and new players excited.
The game still needs polish and a few features added, but that should not stop you from picking up a copy and exploring this beautiful, terrifying island. Even better if you grab a few friends and experience it in co-op.
