It’s not the frightening, dark, and dour moments that make The Forest special – it’s when you find something beautiful. A survival game where you gnaw on raw meat, build crude weapons to beat cannibalistic monsters to death, and get violently ill from drinking pond water, The Forest is also a celebration of life’s smaller pleasures. Especially played with a friend, there’s profound satisfaction in building a house together, or sitting down beneath the moonlight to barbecue the day’s catch. Frostpunk has the politics, RimWorld the mechanical complexity, and Valheim the Norse aesthetic, but The Forest – which, if you take it from the earliest alpha build, is now ten years old – remains one of the PC’s greatest survival games. And now it’s more popular on Steam than ever before.
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