Sons of the Forest

Sons of the Forest is a survival horror game developed by Endnight Games and published by Newnight for Windows. It is the sequel to The Forest from 2018. The game entered early access on Steam on February 23, 2023, and its full 1.0 release followed on February 22, 2024.

Players take the role of Jack Holt, a journalist who joins a team of private military contractors hired by PuffCorp to search an island called Site 2 for the company’s missing founder and CEO, Edward Puffton, along with his wife Barbara and daughter Virginia. After the team’s helicopters are shot down, Jack must survive an island inhabited by cannibals and mutated creatures while uncovering cave systems, bunkers and ancient structures tied to an artifact known as the Cube.

The game is an open-world survival experience in which players craft, build and decide for themselves where to go and how to stay alive. They can make fires, cut materials with an axe and construct anything from a small cabin to larger structures, while fighting enemies with weapons such as pistols, axes and stun batons. The map is four times larger than the one in its predecessor, and new mechanics include 3D printing and friendly characters such as Kelvin, who follows written commands, and Virginia, who can be armed to help in combat.

Sons of the Forest can be played alone or in online cooperative multiplayer with up to eight players. Depending on the choices made near the end of the story, the game has several different endings.

Announced in December 2019, the game was first planned for May 2022 but was delayed to October 2022 and then to February 2023, before Endnight chose to launch it in early access to avoid further delays. It sold over 2 million copies within 24 hours of its early access launch and reached over 250,000 concurrent players on Steam on launch day. Critics gave it generally favorable reviews according to Metacritic, and a sequel, Forest 3, was announced in December 2025.