Sons of the Forest Review — Your Cabin In The Woods

Sent to find a missing billionaire on a remote island, things in Sons of The Forest take a turn for the deadly when your helicopter crashes, leaving you stranded with nothing but some basic supplies. You are alone with your deafened friend and any other players you bring into the server. You must find the mystery behind the island and its inhabitants while fighting to survive their relentless attacks.

If I could describe Sons of The Forest in one sentence, I think it would be “A cinematic experience.” That isn’t to say you’ll be stuck in a bunch of cutscenes as you play, but rather that the game is incredibly, deeply immersive. Everything, from the limited UI to the many animations played from the restricted first-person view, is designed to make you feel like you’re actually there, doing everything in the forest yourself.

This immersiveness continues into the way the game handles crafting. Looking to build a fire? Gather some sticks, snap them in half, place them on the ground, then burn some leaves. Upgrade that same fire by manually placing stones around it. Need a wall to separate you from the locals. Chop down a tree, shove a log into the ground, and use your axe to sharpen the top. For more complicated structures, like log cabins and beds, you can put down blueprints and slowly add materials to them, but even doing that might require you to chop a tree down, split a log in half, and chop it into boards.

This super immersive building style is fun but thankful for most structures; you can circumvent the extra steps by just adding the base, unrefined materials to the structure, which will refine itself for you.

Accessing the inventory is always fun. Your inventory is your backpack, which you lay on the ground to look inside. Every item in the game that you can carry here has been thoughtfully placed in its specific area, making it feel like you’re going through a backpack full of stuff whenever you reach in there. You’ll be truly impressed by how much you can carry, and if you’re looking to distract yourself from some unsettling recent events you can play with the little LED light in there to pass the time.

This dedication to immersion is more than just a stylistic point and plays into the game’s main theme, which would be its horror.

Sons of the Forest sees your intrusion on the Island met by its many inhabitants, the “locals,” who, while on the surface may seem to simply be the indigenous natives, have a far more sinister origin below the surface. Quite literally, below the surface, many of the game’s mysteries must be solved by venturing into the subterranean homes of the Island’s inhabitants.

Your introduction to these locals starts slowly. As you venture down the mountain from your helicopter crash, you start feeling something might be wrong. Other members of your team are found dead, industrial sites are left abandoned, and something seems to be following you just outside of your vision.

When you come to your first set of strung-up bodies, heads on spikes, or otherwise emaciated corpses, you realize that whatever is following you might not be so friendly.

As you set up your camp, you might see yourself approached by other people. Some are running on all fours and don’t seem to like getting too close. Others might stand there, just beyond the treeline, staring at you and examining you. Trying to see what you’re made of. These same people might approach you, make threatening gestures, and leave.

The game makes one thing clear: dominance between you and these locals has to go one way or another. If they see you as weak, they will come back, try to kill you, and may even succeed. If you kill them, however, they take notice. You can put heads on spikes or deliberately shake them, causing them to react in terror and flee. It isn’t unclear whether striking first keeps you safe or makes you more angry. The game has a clear balancing act between defending yourself and putting up a strong front, not knowing when or how the local people might react to your behavior.

Once you see one of the game’s many mutated beasts, you realize they aren’t exactly people, either.

I took a little bit of issue with Sons of the Forest for the difficulty scaling, though I’m not sure if I’m justified in complaining. Be very careful when you sleep because it seems that as time progresses, your presence on the island becomes more and more known, and the local tribes will come for you. What starts as threatening gestures on day one will become full night time raids on day seven.

This means you have to play a balancing act between setting up camp and exploring the island, one that I haven’t totally mastered myself. Setting up camp gives you defenses like walls, traps, and doors you can lock, while exploring gives you access to the important gear you can only find in specific areas, like firearms, grenades, etc.

Either way, you must prepare, because they are coming, whether you’re ready or not.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Sons of the Forest is available on Steam.