I remember when I was first gifted The Forest and I tried it out. I thought it was a mediocre game at best, and the fact that you could only have one save whether it’s in multiplayer or solo was dumb. This was back in late 2014. Two weeks ago, I started picking up The Forest again, and oh my goodness, I’m so happy with the changes.

The Forest is an open world, survival, horror game. The premise of the story is that your character was on a plane with his son, and mid-flight there was an accident that caused the plane to go plummeting down onto an island. As you start to come to your senses, you see a naked man in a loincloth take your son away, and then you pass out again. When you actually wake up once more, that’s when you start taking control of your character. With only a knife in your hand, you must scavenge the forests surrounding the crashed plane and keep yourself alive while trying to find your son.

The island also happens to be riddled with cannibals. The guy who took your son probably was a cannibal. Everything’s wonderful. In order to keep cannibals away, you basically have to fight them off your base, build some effigies (which consists of fallen cannibal body parts stuck onto a stake) then set it on fire, and be diligent. At one point, we went home to our base and found cannibals eating all the dried meat we had hung up on the drying racks.

Wood/rocks, supplies, etc.

Food! Farm, drying rack…

Effigies to keep cannibals away

Now on to why my opinion towards the game changed entirely. Firstly, saves work perfectly now. You have 6 save slots, so you can go crazy with your saves.

Secondly, the cannibals that come to get you are not as hard as I remember them to be. I also remembered that when I first played, instead of attacking players in the game equally, they would target me rather than the host of the game, choosing to ignore the host entirely. That made my life on the island a living hell. Now we all get equally attacked 🙂

There’s now way less bugs which makes the game more feasible to play. I remember when there was a bird bug where the bird would never leave half of your screen, successfully obscuring your vision. Supplies were also way more easier to keep track of, and they introduced a lot of new storage solutions so you weren’t stuck holding on to a maximum amount of everything.

Found a cannibal village and thought this was funny. Some guy was drying sticks?? You can see it on the rightmost string.

The good thing about this alpha is that you have goals. I don’t think you can actually find your son yet, and that’s to come. However, there is a passenger’s manifest with all the names of the passengers on your plane. Your goal is to figure out what happened to them. I think most of them can be found in the caves system, which is also where the cannibals lurk. Going into the caves means you’ll need to have supplies on you, as well as warm clothing. And you also have to be ready to fight around every corner. Time to stock up on survival gear!

The caves are also really creepy. The things that live there are scarier than your regular cannibals. For example, one cave we went into greeted us with a floor of dead babies…

Really loving how far this game has progressed and glad that when I first got this game, it was only about $11. Great deal for the playtime I’m getting out of this! Keep up the great work Endnight Games!