Sons Of The Forest

Endnight Games spent years living up to the reputation The Forest built — atmospheric, genuinely unsettling survival horror with a base-building system that made claiming a hostile island feel personal rather than procedural. Sons Of The Forest carries that reputation into a full sequel, dropping you on a new, cannibal-infested coastline in search of a missing billionaire, and it gets enough of the original right that its most persistent criticism isn't about what it does badly — it's about how much of it there actually is.

Building that still leads the genre

The construction system remains Sons Of The Forest's clearest strength. Everything about it is tactile rather than menu-driven: breaking sticks to build a fire, cutting windows and floors out of standing structures with an axe, choosing between a quick lean-to and a genuinely ambitious seaside compound. Few survival games make the physical act of building feel this satisfying, and it's the system reviewers across both positive and negative camps consistently single out as excellent, regardless of how they feel about everything else.

Kelvin, and the island's best unscripted moments

Your AI companion, Kelvin, has become something close to a folk hero among the game's own players — not always for the reasons Endnight intended. Ask him to help build a treehouse, and there's a real chance he'll cheerfully chop down the exact tree it's built on; send him to gather logs, and he'll interpret the task with a literalism that's produced some of the community's most shared moments. It's a good illustration of what the game does best: systems loose enough that genuinely funny, unscripted things happen regularly, especially in co-op, where the horror and the comedy constantly trade places depending on who's watching.

The complaint that dominated the early reviews

The most heavily upvoted negative reviews, concentrated in the weeks around the game's original Early Access launch and again at its 1.0 release, make a consistent and detailed case: for an island this large and this beautiful, there's surprisingly little to actually do once the initial exploration wears off. Reviewers in this camp describe running out of meaningful goals within roughly a dozen hours, a map that looks dense but plays out mostly empty, and combat against the cannibal population that reads as relentless rather than tense — denying the quieter survival rhythm some players came for. A number of these reviews explicitly connect that disappointment to how long the sequel took to arrive after the original The Forest, framing the content gap as a letdown relative to the wait rather than a flaw in isolation.

A gap that recent reviews suggest has narrowed

What's notable, checking the review data now rather than at launch, is the direction sentiment has moved since. The lifetime score sits at 88.4% positive across more than 316,000 reviews, but pulling the 100 most recent English reviews shows 91% positive — a modest improvement rather than the decline you'd expect if the "empty island" complaint were still the dominant experience. Recent reviews skew shorter and more casually positive, focused on co-op fun and the building system, with far less of the detailed, frustrated "there's nothing here" argument that defined the loudest launch-era reviews. That's consistent with a game that's had over a year and a half of post-1.0 patches to address exactly the complaint its own community raised most loudly, though this review can't independently confirm which specific systems changed to produce that shift.

What the numbers say about the long game

Steam's achievement data tells a fairly ordinary story for a survival game of this shape: early milestones like surviving the first day or building your first substantial structure sit at 46 to 89% of the player base, while deeper completionist goals — eating every edible item, discovering every blueprint, printing every craftable object — drop under 3%. That's the normal profile of a long-tail survival game rather than evidence of players abandoning it early; most people who buy Sons Of The Forest are here for the core survival-and-building loop rather than a full completionist run, and the data reflects that split cleanly.

Final verdict

Sons Of The Forest is a beautiful, frequently very fun survival-horror sandbox held back from a higher score by its own launch reputation — a widely shared, well-argued complaint that the island promised more than the moment-to-moment game delivered. Recent review sentiment running ahead of the lifetime average is the best evidence that gap has closed somewhat since, even if this review can't say by exactly how much. For the building alone, and for what it does with a co-op group, it's an easy recommendation at 7.5 — just go in with the expectation calibrated by its actual current reputation rather than the anticipation that built up during years of waiting for it.

Price and review data checked 5 August 2026.

If you'd rather your progression carried on steadily without demanding constant vigilance against cannibals, Wanderer offers a considerably gentler kind of persistent world.