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Sons of the Forest didn’t launch on Steam at 9 am Pacific today when it was supposed to, but about an hour later it became available to purchase so long as you didn’t run into error messages. Whatever was clogging up Valve’s store seems to have been cleared out now, as the early access survival game has hopped from the top of Steam’s most-wishlisted list to the top of its bestsellers list (opens in new tab), knocking Company of Heroes 3 into second place for the week.
Sons of the Forest has over 250,000 concurrent players on Steam (opens in new tab) on its launch day, making it the platform’s third most-played game right now behind CS:GO and Dota 2, and ahead of Hogwarts Legacy. (It was below Hogwarts when this updated article was first published.) It’s also currently the most-watched game on Twitch (opens in new tab).
The open world survival game is a follow-up to 2018’s The Forest, which stranded players on a cannibal-filled island after a plane crash. Sons of the Forest sends us to another forested island, this time in search of a missing billionaire, and it’s just our luck that this island is also full of mutant cannibals.
As is the modern survival game way, chopping down trees is an essential activity in Sons of the Forest, which’ll see us build more and more complex weapons and buildings as we progress. However, there’s an interesting addition to the survival formula here: NPC companions who can help us out with the less-exciting survival tasks, like, say, chopping down trees.
PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston jumped into Sons of the Forest as soon as he had it downloaded, and he’s written some beginner’s tips for anyone else whose helicopter crashed in a mysterious forest recently. He also carried his own head around for a bit, so it seems like things are going well.
Sons of the Forest costs $30 on Steam (opens in new tab), and we’ll let you know how we’re getting on with it soon. The Steam user reviews are currently “Very Positive,” but the game’s only been out for a few hours, and as an open-ended survival game, it’s the kind of thing people will likely want to put tens or hundreds of hours into.
The developer expects Sons of the Forest to hang out in early access for “6-8 months,” and says the final version will include bug fixes, improvements to “balance and core gameplay,” more stuff to craft, build, and discover, and “additional game mechanics and lore.”
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