Open world survival games are popular games, very popular. Just look at games like DayZ, Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved, Don’t Starve and State of Decay. They give you a world and tell you to create, go nuts, and, most importantly, not die.
But I am not really their biggest fan. I have yet to take the plunge and play Ark: Survival Evolved or Don’t Starve. If I was looking for entertainment, I wouldn’t reach for DayZ or Rust. So when I picked up a copy of The Forest on Steam, I found myself drawn into a world I didn’t quite expect.
Developers Endnight Games have created something that stands heads and shoulders above the plethora of survival games out at the moment. The game itself is simple: you survive a plane crash only to see your son taken away from you by the natives on the island. It’s down to you to find your son, survive and fight any unwanted visitors that you should happen to run into.
Like many open world survival (OWS) games, there is a degree of crafting involved. You need to build shelter, cook food, craft weapons, traps etc in order to be able to venture out further into the island to find your missing son. You need to gather resources, explore the area and scope out the natives. The crafting in the game is easy and simple to use, which usually puts me off similar games.
I get that it is central to the whole point of OWS, but these games can often be bogged down in making things like wooden shoes or a fancy new shack for the beach. Sometimes they can make it too complicated. The Forest keeps things simple, some would say idiot-proof (including this writer), and they do this because the game knows that come nightfall, it’s about to get a whole lot more interesting. Like many OWS games, the worst things tend to happen to you once the sun goes down and The Forest is no exception. But more on that later.
What makes this game so terrifying is how The Forest is set up to fray your nerves and push your limits until you end up just a soiled mess on the island floor and surrendering to your very painful fate. I don’t normally go in for ‘scary’ games but The Forest is different. The creative team behind it have made it so much more than just a game about scary folks or zombies attacking you in the night.
When I started playing and found my character lying in a daze on the floor of the crashed airplane I thought that ‘well this can’t be too bad’. That is, until some tribal paint wearing, spear toting monster bent over me, picked up my kid and scarpered before I had a chance to introduce myself.
As if that wasn’t the worst of my problems, I then had to build shelter, keep warm and feed myself whilst wondering whether my neighbours will be coming round with the welcome basket.
It being daylight, it meant that I wasn’t feeling too nervous. Despite the lack of people around there was an abundance of flora and fauna to keep me and my crafting kit occupied. I tentatively explored my surroundings finding nothing more threatening than sun dappled rivers and uninhabited beaches.
Even before night fell, I found myself gaping in awe at the beauty of this unknown island. The developers have pulled out all the stops to make this island look stunning and the elements to craft tools and shelters are easy to manage.
But then it turned dark and my pitiful camp fire burned weakly as I watched torches flicker in the distance. The neighbours had turned up, but they hadn’t brought any welcome baskets. The natives were back for me.
So I panicked and ran off a cliff and died.
I restarted the game. I found myself being chased by the natives around the island until I was beaten unconscious, but not before I killed one of their number and fended off the rest of them with what remained of his lower leg. Only after waking up in a cave with a whole bunch of mutants waiting for their dinner did this make me realise what a fantastically terrifying game this is.
Endnight Games have given us something to think about as we play hide and seek with the flesh eating monsters. Are the mutants hunting us or are we hunting them? Are we the mutant invaders landing on their ‘peaceful’ island? Whilst they weren’t so vocal in their protest of me being on their island, the ball-tingling terror I experienced when playing this game made me play it again and again and again.
What makes matters so much more interesting is that once you have experienced the first night’s ‘welcome’ party and got your skull redesigned into some sort of ashtray, you begin to see threats around every corner. You fortify yourself against the going down of the sun and eventually you forget all about your child and simply try to kill as many of the mutants as you can before they kill you.
It never ended too well for me in those replays but it showed be that these survival horror games don’t always have to involve zombies and post-apocalyptic wastelands. It can be as simple as one man trying to retrieve his child on an island where there is no hope of rescue.
READ MORE: 10 Biggest Upcoming Horror Games of 2017
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
