Sons of the Forest

You are dropped on a private island to find a missing billionaire, your helicopter goes down, and the island turns out to be occupied by cannibal tribes and something considerably worse underneath it.

It is a survival game with three unusually strong pillars. The building system is the best in the genre, letting you cut individual logs to shape and build genuinely custom structures. The enemies are intelligent, watching your base, testing it, and reacting to what you do. And the story is a proper linear campaign hidden in an open world, played out through caves and facilities that you can reach far earlier than you should.

• Seasons pass, and winter genuinely changes what is available and how dangerous the island is.
• Kelvin and Virginia are AI companions who follow you: one takes orders, one takes patience.
• Caves are the dungeons. They hold the story items and they are the scariest thing in the game.
• You can finish the story in a dozen hours or build a castle for a hundred. Both are supported.

1. 1

   Loot the crash site

   Take everything from the wreckage and the supply crates. The starting kit decides your first night.

2. 2

   Build a small shelter and a fire

   Not a castle. A roof, a fire, a drying rack, somewhere to sleep. You will move once you know the island.

3. 3

   Solve water and food

   A water collector or a drinkable stream, and a way to cook meat. Both are early recipes.

4. 4

   Recruit Kelvin properly

   Kelvin follows written orders: gather logs, build, fish. He is a whole second worker if you actually use the note system.

5. 5

   Learn the cannibals' behaviour

   They scout, they mark territory, they watch your base and they escalate. Fighting every patrol makes them worse, avoiding them entirely also has consequences.

6. 6

   Go into a cave when you are ready

   Caves hold the tools that unlock progression: the rebreather, the rope gun, the shovel. Take a light, a weapon and armour.

Most survival games give you snap-together prefabs. This one gives you logs, a saw and a chalk line: you place logs individually, cut them into planks and beams, and build shapes the game never anticipated.

• Blueprints exist for people who want speed. Freeform log building exists for people who want a real house.
• Defensive design matters. Walls, spike traps and elevated entrances change how raids go.
• Kelvin can be told to gather and to build, which makes large projects realistic solo.
• Location matters more than materials: water access, a view of the approach, and defensible ground.

• The GPS marks points of interest. The story runs through them in a rough sequence and the game never tells you the order.
• Cave items gate progress: the rope gun and rebreather open routes you cannot otherwise reach.
• There is more than one ending, and getting the fuller one takes extra work.
• You can stumble into late-game areas early. The game allows it and will not save you from it.

The island is owned, studied and exploited. Puffton, the missing billionaire, came here for a reason, and so did the corporation that built the facilities buried under the rock. The cannibals are not the villains of the story so much as the surface layer of it.

• The artefact and the technology around it are the throughline, carried over from the first game.
• Documents, photographs and abandoned laboratories tell you what was being attempted and who authorised it.
• The mutants are made things. That is the horror: everything monstrous here has a paper trail.
• Virginia and Kelvin are quietly the emotional core. What happens to them lands harder than the plot does.

• Co-op keeps the full story and makes the horror funnier and the building faster.
• Split roles: one builds, one hunts, one scouts caves. Cave runs are far safer as a pair.
• Enemies scale with the group, so a bigger team is not a free pass.
• The host owns the world, so play on one save with one regular group if you want the story to progress.

• Carry a light source, always. The caves are genuinely dark.
• Sleep to save, and save before anything risky.
• Do not build your first base at the crash site. Explore for an in-game day first.
• Armour matters more than weapons early. Cannibals hit hard and often.
• Give Kelvin standing orders every morning. Idle Kelvin is wasted labour.
• Use the GPS markers. Getting lost is the most common way an evening evaporates.

• The official site and patch notes for what the latest update changed.
• The community wiki for cave item locations and building recipes, if you want the campaign unblocked.
• Ask in our Discord, but check first whether your group is up for horror. This one is not for everybody.