It’s not the frightening, dark, and dour moments that make The Forest special – it’s when you find something beautiful. A survival game where you gnaw on raw meat, build crude weapons to beat cannibalistic monsters to death, and get violently ill from drinking pond water, The Forest is also a celebration of life’s smaller pleasures. Especially played with a friend, there’s profound satisfaction in building a house together, or sitting down beneath the moonlight to barbecue the day’s catch. Frostpunk has the politics, RimWorld the mechanical complexity, and Valheim the Norse aesthetic, but The Forest – which, if you take it from the earliest alpha build, is now ten years old – remains one of the PC’s greatest survival games. And now it’s more popular on Steam than ever before.
Too often, survival games rely on the drama and the power of unremitting bleakness. The more miserable a game, the more evocative, and intellectually engaging. Games should be more unhappy – there’s too much bland, blithe escapism. But pessimism is more keenly felt when it’s balanced with optimism. For there to be ugliness, there also needs to be beauty. This, seemingly, is what Endnight understands. In both The Forest and its sequel, Sons of the Forest, the developer balances moments of brutal terror with the serenity of the landscape. For every hour spent stripping the flesh off a dead cannibal’s leg bone, you spend two hours strolling through the woods, fishing, or planting a garden.
Even now, a decade and more than 475,000 user reviews since it first emerged, The Forest has an ‘overwhelmingly positive’ rating on Steam. And as of this writing, it’s just set a huge player record. 79,451 people logged in to play The Forest simultaneously on Sunday November 3, marking a new all-time high. The player count for Sons of the Forest has also increased significantly: on Monday October 28, it peaked at around 9,000, but in the last 24 hours it leapt to just under 50,000.
Both The Forest and Sons of the Forest have been on sale, with discounts of 80% and 45% respectively. The bad news is that those sales have since ended. The good news is that if you want to try either game regardless of price, or own them already, there are suddenly a lot more people available to join your team.
If you don’t feel like another foray into The Forest, try some of the other best horror games, or maybe the best co-op games available on PC.
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