Like the zombies that often inhabit them, Early Access survival games are a genre that just won’t die. No matter how many times players have been burned by buying a buggy, unfinished survival game, they keep coming back for more, from the early days of DayZ to the smash-hit dino-survival game Ark: Survival Evolved to 2021’s Viking adventure, Valheim.
The latest success in the genre is Sons of the Forest, the sequel to 2014’s The Forest—which also launched in Early Access and took four years to reach a full release in 2018. While it doesn’t have zombies, technically, Sons of the Forest does have plenty of mutants and cannibals, and it also comes with a nice surprise. It’s an Early Access game but it’s not really all that buggy, and is nearly feature-complete, with a main story that can be finished and lots of enjoyable base-building, cannibal-battling features.
And is moddable, so
