Coming at this one as a guy who never played the first Forest title and jumped right into the sequel. This open-world survival horror sandbox makes a pretty strong first impression as you try to survive the mutant freaks around you with little supplies and get your bearings. Unfortunately, the game quickly lost its luster for us.

I think my main issue with this game is that it's actually too easy, because your backpack is just ridiculously big. There's no real motivation to make a fort. I get that in a lot of survival sandboxes, the base-building is a "make your own fun" sort of feature, but in a game like Sons of the Forest I was hoping for it to actually have some utility, where I'd need to store stuff there and pick it up later. I realized how undangerous this world felt when I randomly decided to make a trek across the map and the mountains at its center without a care in the world. Why spend time building a shelter or managing your resources when you can just carry everything on your back and build a makeshift tarp tent with a clicks and survive the night that way.

Sons of the Forest is at its best when you're exploring the caves to find new items, or the secret lab bunkers spread across the map. I liked exploring these areas that give such a stark contrast to the look of the rest of the game, but they are all very linear. There's nothing stopping you from just going all the way to the back of the cave, finding your item, and leaving. The progression is simple and after a while my friends just said screw the survival element and made a beeline to the end.

The climax is rather poorly designed since there was nothing stopping us from running by the enemies and not engaging with them at all, and then you get an utterly wacky final reveal that didn't make any sense at all and I can only assume is teasing lore for a third game, and credits.

Sons of the Forest looks great and has moments where a really quality survival title shines through, but it is ultimately just too easy and forgiving since I could just carry everything I could ever need at any time, and generally didn't feel at peril out and about in the world. Just didn't really get into this one.

I ultimately don't think the tale is that great since I don't think this game is as amazing as The Forest game. Even though it is in early access, this was my first experience with the survival game genre. The gameplay is ok, nothing to get too pumped about in my opinion. It gives away enough about the overall plot of the game, so I doubt I'll play it when it's fully released. I was disappointed to learn that this is a sequel to The Forest, even if I just had the opportunity to watched the plot and gameplay of that game. I don't want to draw any comparisons. I just did not like it.

after putting about 50 hours into it, i have not finished the story, in fact i've barely progressed in it, because this game is so cool to just build around and fight occasionally, the building is intuitive and gimmicky but in a really cool way, it's also never really all that annoying as getting materials doesn't feel like farming as much as other games, given that the materials that you use are reallistically reflected on the buildings as opposed to, idk, needing x number of fictitious wood that's in your inventory to make random chair, the building being tree trunk and stone based makes it simple and satisfying and eliminates the dissonance caused by other building systems in other games. the combat and survival mechanics are good enough too, and the exploration is also fine, the caves are somewhat punishing but it's not all too bad, maybe frustrating sometimes. it's really the type of game to dump your time into and chill out building and finding cool items around the map, which is surprising for a game about cannibals and mutants

survival games without needless complications that i can just chill out in are my bread and butter really

i figure i'll try to beat the story sometime but idk, i'm fine the way i am

also the game is getting regular patches since it's on early access so about every two weeks there's new cool content and it only gets better really

The game has a lot of immersion mechanics that make it seem intimidating to get into, but it is actually pretty simple. Step-by-step guides and even a helper NPC will get you thinking more about what you want to build vs trying to survive and gather the supplies. The game gets ruined by the constant swarming of your new base that lead you to abandoning it to go build another new base, making a cycle of having a bunch of half-built bases you don’t want to go back to. The game fights between wanting to build a base camp to horde all your survival items and exploring various landmarks to progress it’s story. Best with friends but hard to keep everyone invested enough to complete.