Forest 3

Similarly to The Forest, Sons of the Forest puts players in control of a protagonist stranded on an island inhabited by cannibals. Players can build weapons and buildings to aid in their survival. The game supports up to eight-player cooperative multiplayer, though players can also opt to play the game solo. Depending on their actions, players can receive different endings.

The map in this game is four times bigger than that of its predecessor. Several new mechanics have been added to the game, such as 3D printing, as well as friendly NPCs. NPCs include:

Many years after the events of The Forest, a team of private military contractors hired by PuffCorp is dispatched to an island called "Site 2" to search for Edward Puffton (PuffCorp's founder and CEO), his wife Barbara, and his 20 year old daughter Virginia, who have been missing for several months. Jack Holt, the player's character, is a renowned journalist and personal friend of Edward who accompanies the team. The team's helicopters are then shot down by unknown assailants. Jack survives the crash but is knocked out by a man in a silver coat named Jianyu Zhang, a former PuffCorp employee now working for Sahara Therapeutics: the corporation responsible for the events on Site 1. Jack awakens with another surviving teammate named Kelvin, who was rendered deaf and mentally handicapped by the crash.

Working together, Jack and Kelvin set up camp and obtain resources to survive the island, and to defend themselves from cannibal tribes and underground mutants. They are also joined by Virginia, who became a mutant but somehow managed to retain her humanity. As Jack explores the island, he finds sprawling cave systems, underground bunkers, luxury facilities, and ancient structures showing evidence of an advanced civilization. From documents he finds along the way, Jack learns that PuffCorp acquired the island under the guise of turning it into a resort, but was actually competing secretly with Sahara Therapeutics for control of an artifact known as the "Cube".

Sons of the Forest was delayed twice. Announced in December 2019, the game had an initial May 2022 release date. On March 25, 2022, the game was delayed to October of that year "to be able to deliver our vision of the next step in survival games", according to the developer Endnight Games. That August, the game was delayed again to its final release date of February 23, 2023. It was later announced on February 3, 2023, that the game would launch in early access to avoid further delays.

On November 29, 2023, Endnight Games announced that the 1.0 version of the game, containing major gameplay and story updates, would launch on February 22, 2024.

Sons of the Forest received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.

Sons of the Forest surpassed Starfield as the most wishlisted game on Steam. The game sold over 2 million copies within 24 hours of release, and had over 250,000 concurrent players on Steam during its launch day. It became the best-selling game on Steam at the time.