Sons of the Forest

 

I was hesitant about the first game, The Forest. On the surface it seemed like just another trendy survival game influenced by Minecraft and the like. But after spending some time with it, it turned out its not really like that at all. Yes you can craft a base, and do all sorts of building, but its actually a horror story experience which was pleasantly surprising and all the crafting is mostly optional. After finishing the first game, I ended up really liking it and was eager to see more from this developer. To my surprise not long after and they've released Sons of the Forest. Of course I ignored its initial Early Access release, as I always do, but it didnt take too long before the game was finished and able to be played through in full by anyone. I got it on a decent discount sale, too, so I had little doubts that this game would be a good experience, I wasn't very concerned if it would suck.

Sons of the Forest has a similar, albeit slight twist of a premise as the first game. In the first game you're just a simple regular guy whose plane crashes on some remote island and your child gets taken away by creepy cannibals, the goal is obvious, find your kid and escape. In Sons of the Forest however, you're a part of a team of special operatives whose sent on a mission to explore the island and discover some missing politician or powerful man, something like that. Your helicopter ends up crashing, and then your objective is to find the bodies of your fallen allies. Thats the basic premise. And frankly its not as gripping or exciting as the simplicity of the first games premise, just being an ordinary person finding yourself stranded on a creepy island is more intense and immersive than being this spec ops military dude.

The game of course features a full co-op playthrough, which was the main draw in the first place. So we played through in co-op, it has multiple difficulties but as usual we just did Normal. Hosting and joining is simple enough, but there is a bug where sometimes the client cant load in and has to quit the game which was a bit annoying. The co-op, like the first game I think, isnt flawless though. Cutscenes only play for the first person that gets there, while the other guy just watches him do the animations. And at the beginning of the game youre not quite synced up with eachother on the helicopter, which caused some initial confusion until we timed things right ourselves manually. But for the most part the co-op is just as well designed as the first game, with the standard helping eachother up mechanics once you go down, and a basic trading system, although cumbersome and often times more hassle than its worth to interact with.

But the games mechanics and general idea is largely the same as the first game, you wake up at the crash site, and have survival mechanics such as Food, hunger, sleep to keep up with, as well as having to check your GPS map to try to find points of interest to progress through the game. Weirdly enough, Sons of the Forest now has allied NPC's you can come across, which immediately struck me as a strange design choice, and that feeling never really went away. Not before long you run into Kelvin,  who is a friendly NPC but he seems to not be able to speak. The explanation is something like: In the crash he hit his head and forgot how to talk...Yeah, real convenient. It comes across as silly, and gamey, and takes away from the atmosphere. This guy is just a goofy eyesore, you can walk up to him and hold up a notepad to tell him to do basic things, like collect logs, stones, or food, but I largely just saw him as a joke and a stupid inclusion into the games mechanics. It even takes away from the psychological horror aspect of the game, its hard to be quite as unnerved when you have this silly guy running around. You cant even give him weapons, when you get in fights, he kinda just stands there and does nothing, or often times himself dies, only to respawn later as if nothing happened. Its just a very weird design choice. You can also run into another friendly NPC, this woman with 3 arms and 3 legs, which is a disturbing sight to see her sneaking around in the bushes , stalking you throughout the game. At first shes skittish, almost like a rabid animal, but the more you interact with her, and the more you give her things, she warms up to you and starts following you around the world and enjoying your company. Yeah, shes kind of neat and amusing, but again, it kinda just takes away from the isolated horror feeling of the game, and theres not much point to her either, than than looking at her for amusement.
I just looked it up, and guess what? It turns out you CAN give the woman guns, but not the guy. What kinda sense does that make!? You cant give the guy weapons so naturally we think ok, we cant give her either, so we didn't try. Inconsistent, incoherent is like this all over the game.

Even weirder, is the fact that Sons of the Forest seems to take away mechanics and quality of life features that made the first game enjoyable and seamless to progress through. For instance, in the first game if you ever needed to know what to do or what objectives you've done, you had a journal notepad where you cross off caves you've been to and things youve done. This is completely removed from this game, leading to many hours of aimless frustration and boring repetitive wandering around without a clue to do. Indeed, most of the gameplay spent was roaming around doing jack shit, desperately trying to find the next thing we had to do to progress. Its even more confusing because sometimes as you play through the game, in the bottom left it will actually show you an objective being crossed off, as if its a relic of this notepad system - but theres no notepad to be found in the game anymore. Like, which one is it? Why even show me this objective being crossed off If I have no way to look at the notes of what I'm supposed to be doing? Its a mess.

Another example of a strange and out of place inclusion into this sequel is vehicles. Thats right, you can come across goofy vehicles to drive. These include, Golf carts scattered about, a Knight V which is this tiny little unicycle type device that is very silly and stupid to control, Hang Gliders, which at first was fun and impressive, but its far too easy to crash and then permanently lose them, and since we're playing co-op, its no use for just one person to use it so we briefly used it once then never saw it again. And theres a Sled that we crafted, but never bothered to use. So, Golf Carts is the vehicle you'll be trying to use most of the time, and yeah the controls and physics are absolutely laughable. Some of the most stupid, pathetic vehicle physics I think I've ever seen. More often than not its faster to just stay on foot than try to drive this thing, because of the amount you'll be crashing into trees and other small debris. Still, if you stick to the road you might get somewhere. The passenger seats work, which is nice, so the co-op partner can just relax. But the carts take no physical damage, this means you'll be doing stuff like flying golf carts off 500ft mountains and not even getting a scratch, its just ridiculous. What kind of game are they trying to go for here? A silly, unserious meme game? or an intense, psychological horror survival game? Its like they cant decide what they want to make, and the game suffers because of it. Lots of things seem out of place, like the inclusion of the friendly NPC's, the vehicles, and especially the sci-fi elements that start creeping into the games narrative, are just not very appreciated for me. The game even leans into guns pretty hard, but the execution just misses the mark and again feels out of place.

Some more inclusions of mechanics that just rubbed me the wrong way is this Strength mechanic. On your hud, you see a little icon of a Muscle arm. After some experimenting, it turns out that the more you swing your axe or do strength related things, the higher this number goes up. What does the number going up do? Well we werent sure, because the game does such a poor job representing its self to you, but we looked it up and allegedly it increases your health, and stamina. So for hours we would go around swinging our axes like dumbasses increasing this strength number. Yeah, not good. That's just bad design. I always hated games that use this sort of mechanic, like "The more you do something, the better it is!" On paper its ounds fine, but in practice it always ends with the player abusing the mechanic like this, because why not? It reminds me of Morrowind and Oblivion where players would just spend the whole game jumping nonstop, because it slowly increases your Athletics skill ,which makes you run and jump faster. Anyway we eventually got our Strength number to 15 and got so sick of swinging our axes that we just gave up on it, but frankly I didn't really seem to notice much of a difference in my damage, health, or stamina. I still was dying in one hit after being revived, it never seemed to do much. Just more incoherent sloppy design.

As for the "survival" mechanics, such as food, eating, and sleep, its supposed to ruin your stamina when its depleted and blinking, and sure enough it does, but its not this dire life or death situation you might think. Even if youre starving and thirsty for hours, your stamina is still plenty to sprint almost nonstop and traverse the map. It isnt as meaningful and significant as it should be, I get they were trying to not be annoying, but it feels like it trivializes the entire survival system when its not that impactful. For much of the game I'd just ignore the survival mechanics because it didn't seem to matter much. Eventually I did start caring, and eating and drinking became second nature, and sleeping too, but it was more because I had an abundance of resources moreso than actually feeling immersed and wanting to keep up with my stats. They should have actually made you die if you dont eat, or make it so your stamina is absolutely ruined, but balance the amounts of food so its not very annoying, to atleast make the survival system feel meaningful. In its current state, it just doesnt add much to the immersion or gameplay. And the only time we would sleep is when it was turning night time, just so we could skip the night and go back to day. But there is an annoying thing with sleeping, where you can frequently get interrupted and enemies will teleport ontop of you, preventing you from sleeping until youre safe. This often turns into entire night times of getting ambushed as we try to sleep, only to get killed, respawn directly ontop of an enemy camp, and spend the entire night dying and respawning because the game stupidly spawns you ontop of a damn enemy camp! I even tried stealthing my way out, but the game barely seems to have stealth mechanics, atleast I could never make it work. Another pretty big missed mark, the whole survival mechanics and this frustrating spawn system.

Still, the initial objective seems simple enough. Look at the GPS, and go towards these purple icons which are bodies of your fallen allies. Sure, so we did that, and they got marked off as we went to them, indicating progress. Until we reached the last one, where it required a shovel. Ok, get a shovel, that should be easy enough, right? I mean if it was real life or basically any other game, you could just craft a shovel made of stones and sticks, it does the job. But much to our surprise, we spent almost the entire duration of the games campaign looking for this damn shovel! I mean it, we got to the require shovel objective at like hour 2, and it wasnt until hour 15 that we actually found the thing. What the fuck! Its like this massive epic quest across the entire island, just to find the shovel. We spent so many hours scratching our fucking heads walking into random caves, wasting our time, making no progress, in search for this mysterious shovel. It wasnt very fun either, it was like annoying, exhausting, boring, our patience was running thin. The exploration in this game isnt as fascinating as the first, either. The sights and sounds arent as memorable or have near as many interesting landmarks. Like in the first game you would go into a cave and find insane sights of guys crucified, strange plane seats full of passengers in the caves, cult like rituals, all sorts of crazy shit. But here, in Sons of the Forest, the games are quite tame in comparison. Theres barely any memorable landmarks or interesting locations, all the caves are just...empty, except for a few times when you find like a space ship towards the end of the game, and frankly thats about it. The caves are a massive disappointment, so roaming around the map, spending 30+ minutes slowly walking to cave after cave, trying to find this damn shovel, started to wear our patience thin.

It turns out we've been to multiple caves we had to, but we managed to walk right past the tiny paths which led to mandatory progress items. For instance one cave, has the Rope Gun, which is required to use one time to slide down a rope. We actually found the cave with the rope, but we were confused why we couldnt slide down it. Why would you have to use a rope gun? Just wrap pieces of cloth or something around your hands, we thought we had to go craft something so that took more hours of wasted wandering around. We even found zipline hooks, excitedly we ran back to the rope cave, but nope still nothing. Frustrating.

We missed the path with the Rope Gun because the game is too cryptic. The paths you must go are obscured in darkness, with nothing interesting or memorable nearby. There are so many ways you can subtly guide the player towards mandatory paths, without coddling them or making the game trivial. They didnt do anything, theres just tiny little hidden paths you must find and if you dont, you can find yourself roaming around for hours doing absolutely nothing. They could of put a weird statue, ritual site, flickering red light, ANYTHING nearby the path to indicate its special , memorable, or a unique place. But they did nothing. And its a common problem throughout the game, theres just shit pacing, and a general complete lack of direction or guiding the player, to the point where we lost patience after playing for something like 15 hours and still not finding the shovel that we just started Googling things. After trekking back across the map, getting the rope gun, trecking across the map to the rope cave, sliding across the rope. We also ran completely past the Rebreather, basically scuba gear required to progress the game by diving into caves. Same story, there was just one tiny path that had nothing unique or indicative nearby, that we managed to walk right past. We had to look this up too. They just do such a bad job at subtly guiding the player towards progress, the game has such a bad feeling of pacing and progression that it ruins a lot of the excitement and wonder and instead makes you feel like youre wasting your time, and doing nothing. But finally we began to make progress towards getting the shovel after sadly having to Google these two items.

I'll quickly note that another strange inclusion (omission) , is, like I said previously, in the first game it checks off cave youve been to on your notebook. Well in this game that notebook doesnt excist, instead the game seems to expect you to manually drop these "GPS Locator" items , which basically act as landmarks on your map, well it wasnt until halfway through the game we realized what these things do, and by this point its too late to start using them, because we've already been inside lots of caves so we dont know which ones to use it on. Another failure of a mechanic, missed mark, and example of devs being terrible at directing the player or setting up your expectations of mechanics and how to progress the game.

The game also features 3d printers, which you can find in a few of the bunkers and labs you come across, but this mechanic seems kinda half baked and pointless. Like, you cant make anything that interesting. A water canteen? Ok, I crafted it but never needed to use it. A Red mask to put on to trick the enemies? Ok, a silly novelty item, but I never used it. A sled? Ok we crafted it, but never used it, another novelty thing. I mean, what else is there? Just another weird inclusion that felt out of place.

After all that, getting the shovel, and going back to the dig site, the reward was a Shotgun. I thought it was going to be something to help give us direction throughout the game, guess not. This leads me to mention how this game has a much larger focus on guns than the first game. In the first game, you only get guns about 85% into the game, in Sons of the Forest, you get a pistol in the first 2 hours, a shotgun, another revolver pistol, and a rifle, among others. Thats an interesting design change, but the problem is the execution sucks. The guns are worthless peashooters. The pistol in particular is pathetic, needing like 10+ bullets to kill a basic cannibal enemy, forget using it to try to take out the other bigger monsters. The shotgun isnt much better, at times taking 6+ shots point blank to kill enemies. This could of easily been re-balanced and fixed. All they had to do was make the ammo much more scarce, but make each individual bullet more impactful and satisfying. Instead, you have bullets all over the place, but the guns feel like shit, making the whole gunplay aspect of the game fall flat. Even the controls for the guns are senseless, like the shotgun has two ammo types, Buckshot and Slugs. Well we kept wondering why cant we reload the shotgun, when we stil have some ammo left? It turns out you have to LOOK DOWN at your feet to change ammo types and reload...What? I've never heard of something so stupid. Just why? They couldnt figure out a button to use, they thought it was more realistic to have to look down? We didnt realize this until over halfway through the game. Just insane design choices.

The enemy design like the first game is still wonderful and creative. You've got all sorts of deranged cannibals, and as the days go on and the game progresses you start to see more and more crazy monsters showing up all over the island. Cannibals start wearing armor, or even flesh of other victims, creepy masks, their AI is still amazing, the way they stalk you, they climb trees, they sometimes almost act friendly, the AI for the monsters in general is one of the best things about the game, as well as the plethora of different designs. Still, I feel like it misses the visceral horror that the first game had, falling into a cave and seeing these guys was a real shocking experience in the first game, but here in the sequel its more tame, maybe its due to the emphasis on the guns, or how the game generally feels more action packed, but something about the monsters isnt quite as gripping or disturbing as in the first game. They are still very interesting though, you come across blobs of flesh that have tons of giant fingers popping out of them, all sorts of monsters that are almost beyond description. You still have the creepy babies crawling around, and you get these weird red skinned cannibals that show up that are quite the unnerving sight.


But, there are lots of annoying, stupid little small things, that after adding up make the whole experience in Sons of the Forest feel like a grueling slog moreso than an intense & interesting survival horror story experience. For instance, the GPS map, something you'll rely on the entire game to try to progress. You can't see the whole GPS screen, even if you zoom all the way out, you still cant see the entire island. This is a crucial flaw, this means just to simply glance at where to possibly go, you'll have to spend sometimes upwards of 20-30 minutes just aimlessly walking a direction just to scroll the map! So much time wasted just running in one direction just to be able to scroll the GPS screen to at least see whats on the screen. Just why? What purpose does that serve? None, just to waste your time. Its not even realistic, on a real GPS you can of course zoom all the way out, so what the fuck?

Theres so many other poorly designed things it can be endless, how about the cumbersome overwhelming controls? It seems like from my memory, that this game has far more controls and things you can do and equip compared to the first game. This makes the entire control scheme bloated and a mess, you press buttons to hold certain items such as Flashlights, lighters, on the left hand, and the right hand is reserved for other certain items. Even the simple act of putting away an item from your hand is a clunky mess because the control scheme is so bloated. While I appreciate the big immersive inventory system, showing you all the items youve collected on one screen, gives each item this real feeling of weight and significance, like they are real items not just sprites on a game screen - but again, compared to the first game, this game has so many items that even opening your inventory to find something you're looking for is a massive hassle and takes so much time its like digging through a needle in a haystack. There are so many ways this could of been improved, how about the last 5 items youve picked up glow in a very obvious way? Well, I think thats supposed to be a mechanic, but it doesnt seem to work very well at all. I noticed a glow sometimes, but its never for the item I'm looking for that I JUST picked up.

Believe it or not there is a mechanic to try to alleviate how cumbersome it is to try to equip items in tense situations or swiftly, theres a Backpack you can manually add some items to. Well for atleast more than half of the game I couldnt figure out what the point of the backpack was , or how to use it. You just put things in it, and thats it. Eventually I got so confused by it I caved in and looked it up. Well it turns out you HOLD a button and he brings up the backpack, like a quick-select menu. How was I supposed to know you have to hold certain buttons to make certain mechanics appear? The game does such a terrible job of explaining the mechanics to you, theres not even any popups or hints to tell you the controls or how to interact with the game, it just expects you to I guess Google how to play the damn game? It sucks, and again, like wasted a significant amount of fun I could of had if I realized this backpack system sooner into the game instead of fumbling around with the full inventory while in the heat of battle.

I can keep going with gripes about the mechanics, so I will.
How about every time you go down, and get revived, you come back with 1% health, meaning you often get stuck in loops where you die, get revived, repeat endlessly because theres no slight invincibility period and the getting up animation takes too long. It just feels sloppy and like shit game design. How about when coming back to life you instead get 50% health so you die in 2 or 3 hits again? Constantly getting one hit isnt fun. Its even more senseless because you'd think eating food and drinking would give you health , well it doesnt. Ok maybe some specific items give you health, but its such a laughable amount its just mindboggling. They'll give you like maybe 5 health. The only real way to get health is by finding Meds, but you can go long periods of time without having any, being stuck on 1% health dying in one hit over and over, it just sucks.

How about the GPS icons being tiny  and barely able to see anything? At least for me and my resolution, maybe the game doesn't scale well on some resolutions.
The GPS player indicator is at least this tiny yellow triangle, I can barely see what direction im facing or where I am on the gps at any given time , the whole navigation system sucks, which is a really bad thing to fuck up in a game like this. To add insult to injury, the games map is very mountainous and vertical, so rarely is it as simple as just running in a direction - no, you'll have to navigate annoyingly around giant mountains, or abuse the games shitty physics to jump your way across or slide down the mountain like its some janky Bethesda game or something.

After finally getting the shovel and shotgun we thought we'd have some sense of direction and what to do, but no. We're left at another standstill, with no idea what to do. Cue countless hours of driving around, walking around the island aimlessly trying to figure out what to do. Multiple back to back sessions doing essentially nothing, making no progress, being out of patience and frustrated at the whole game.

But, the game does have some silver lining. For one, the graphics can be quite impressive and beautiful, especially the draw distances and vistas on those aforementioned mountains.
The biggest source of enjoyment, believe it or not, came from the Radio and music in the game. Thats right, when everything was dull and dreary, we atleast had a smile on our faces carrying around this stupid boombox listening to the games soundtrack. You can equip a boombox and just walk around blasting music, and theres a lot of it. The soundtrack seems to hae dozens of songs, to various amusing qualities. From depressing post-rock music, somber piano music, cliche but hilarious rock n roll music, to upbeat infectiously catchy jingles such as "Hey you" and the Crunchie Wunchies theme. This melody gets repeated in atleast 5 different songs  in the games soundtrack, and ofter the days playing the game it got stuck our heads like a damn virus. You can even find a guitar in the game where you can walk around playing guitar riffs in first person, and of course this Crunchie Wunchie theme is one of them you can strum out, the small details like this made the game a lot more of a happy experience than it otherwise wouldnt be. You can even put the radio on in the Golf car, but we didnt realize this for far too long because it also uses the same stupid control scheme as reloading the shotgun, where you have to stop the damn kart and look down at the ground to turn the radio on.

So we eventually got so impatient and sick of making no progress that after like 18 hours of gameplay and no clue what to do, we had to look it up again.
So you have to find 3 keycards and use the keycards to go to these maintenance bunkers, to progress the game. Well we already have been to some of these bunkers, and of course we walked past some important path or missed some item. More hours of frustration, looking things up, getting really pissed off and sick of the game, we finally stumbled our way through some underground bunkers, used the key card, found this like weird corporate building place with a room of zombie people and a big creepy armed monster? Thats about the most eventful thing we've seen. Then you swim down in some cave, come across this spaceship thing with a weird question mark artifact in it, and a few more sessions of trying to find the location of where to use the rest of the keycards, we go into this luxury place with big TV's on the walls, come across a cutscene of a human NPC with a mutant arm, he puts his arm up against the wall and says "The door wont open, it needs something"  Clueless, we had no idea what to do. What do you mean the door wont open? What do we do? We tried for an hour to figure it out, but were clueless. Again, the games pacing and direction being terrible. We had to look it up. You have to run outside the bunker, and craft some fucking grave thing, put this Ancient Armor inside the grave, to infuse it with magical sci-fi powers, then go back and open the door....What? How the hell is anyone gonna realize that? Thats some cryptic, Simons Quest tier bullshit! What the fuck is wrong with these devs? Did they get anyone to playtest this?

So for the first time in the entire game, youre forced to interact with the crafting and blueprint system. We spend an hour doing nothing but literally carrying fucking stones back and forth to this crafting object, do the stupid sci-fi ritual with the armor, go back down and the door opens. Bad. Then you're in this firey hell cave place full of enemies, being escorted by an NPC which shoots at the enemies for you, and you come across this big boss, which was actually cool and exciting. The game actually has a boss fight! Something is happening! Its a pretty intense fight, we died but made our way back, killed him and actually felt accomplished and had fun. Well guess what? Thats the end of the game. Yeah, we turned a corner and its like "Achievement unlocked, beat the game!" I was jawdropped. Thats it? I felt like we barely fucking did anything! What did we do, go around and find a few bodies, go through caves to find a shovel, go to 3 copy paste bunkers, drive around like idiots in a golf cart for hours clueless, craft some stupid sci-fi armor , and the games over? What the fuck, man.

Well its not over quite yet, theres one more joke of a boss fight. Its this big mutant guy who swings a damn helicopter at you, the thing is, hes a pushover. The fight lasted 30 seconds. Shoot him 10 times with a shotgun and hes done for. Then you get asked if you want to stay on the island by interacting with the lame out of place sci-fi item, or leave. Naturally leaving the island seems like the canon choice, so we did that. Then you get some cutesy cutscene of you and the NPC guy and 3 armed girl flying away, you get a humorous cutscene showing the NPC guy in some brain damage hospital playing with toys like a toddler, and you get a scene showing the three armed girl going into surgery to remove her extra limbs. Then, it shows the three of you driving off into the sunset like a happy family. I mean its comical and goofy, sure, but still, its like they just cant tell what kind of vibe they're trying to go for with the game and the story, just bizarre.

We reloaded our save to see the other option, staying on the island. Its about what it sounds like, you just stay and can keep playing, implying it wants you to go find the rest of the optional mysterious sci-fi items to make some magical epic item or something, but yeah we don't care.

Thats Sons of the Forest. A game that doesnt really know what it wants to be, a mishmash of confused mechanics and plot lines, the sci-fi narratives were just bad, and the lack of direction and a real plot, among with the countless other annoying design choices, made it a bit of a slot to get through. Its kind of bittersweet, because I was really fond of the first game, what with the big giant chasm in the middle of the map, it just gave you suh a sense of wonder. But in Sons of the Forest, I didn't have nearly as much wonder or amazement with the game world, it all just fell flat. They couldn't capture that same magic again, unfortunately. That said, its not all bad, the game does have its moments of fun, it is interesting collecting all these items and having a backpack full of stuff to interact with, it is a realistic immersive game with all the animations, everything you do feels like it has so much weight with the animations, it is quite a combat heavy game, both melee and guns, so it is more of an action game compared to the first, which can be exciting at times, the graphics can be quite stellar, the soundtrack in particular is highly entertaining, but sadly the game has too many flaws to be a great experience.

6/10