There comes a point in every long-running gaming group when someone looks at the current game, surveys the accumulated infrastructure, livestock, machinery, weapons, unfinished construction projects and several hundred hours of collective bad decisions, and says:
Perhaps it is time for something new.
And so, after our lengthy expedition to Icarus, the Crypt Creep Forces packed away the zebras, abandoned the industrial-scale mining operation, waved goodbye to Winchester and went looking for somewhere a little more relaxing.
Somewhere tropical.
Somewhere with beaches.
Somewhere with zip lines, hang gliders, weather effects, houseboats and tree houses.
A game that promises so much fun.
Sons of the Forest.
On paper, it sounds magnificent.
There are zip lines.
There are hang gliders, which we enjoyed immensely in Enshrouded.
There are golf carts.
There are electric bikes.
There are tree houses.
There are houseboats.
There is fishing.
There is farming.
There is coffee.
There is vodka.
There are cannibals.
Did we mention the cannibals?
No?
Well.
There are quite a lot of cannibals.
Still, what's not to love?
The Crypt Creep Forces therefore boarded the metaphorical aircraft of optimism, carefully stowed all previous experience in the overhead lockers, and prepared to discover exactly how badly four men with nearly three decades of cooperative gaming experience could manage a tropical holiday.
Quite badly, as it turns out.
How the Game Starts
The premise is straightforward.
You are a billionaire.
You are on a resort island.
Something has gone terribly wrong and you need extraction for yourself and your family.
Naturally, when you're a billionaire trapped on a remote island crawling with unpleasant things, you don't ring the police, the military or some discreet international private security organisation.
You call the Crypt Creep Forces.
Because when competence is optional but enthusiasm is guaranteed, CCF is apparently what appears in the brochure.
Unfortunately, something went wrong.
Our helicopter crashed on the island.
Then somebody stole our advanced gear, weapons and armour, leaving us scattered around the crash site with little more than a basic survival kit and a growing suspicion that the travel agent had omitted several important details from the resort description.
Just a regular CCF mission, then.
When CCF crashes, there really is nobody else to call.
Technically, we could call Sturnim.
But that would be like asking Craig to resist temptation.
We aren't doing that again.
Night was approaching, so there was no time to sit around analysing precisely which subsection of the operation had already gone catastrophically wrong.
We had to deal with the three basic human survival requirements:
Shelter.
Food.
Water.
And, although not listed in most survival manuals:
Try not to be eaten by the locals.
The New Organisational Structure
Naturally, we had designated roles.
CCF works best when everybody understands their responsibilities, ignores everybody else's responsibilities and then blames Myles when the resulting system collapses.
This time, however, we decided to shake things up.
A little.
Not much.
Dave became the Gatherer.
Myles remained the Medic.
Zaph became the Hunter.
And Craig became the Builder.
Yes.
Craig.
Builder.
The man whose previous architectural contributions have included ladders to nowhere, holes nobody requested and structures whose primary function appears to be challenging local planning regulations.
We gave him construction.
This was a deliberate decision made by adults.
History will judge us.
Dave Does Research
Whenever CCF starts a new game, Dave likes to perform some basic research.
Nothing excessive.
A few beginner guides.
Perhaps Ten Things You Should Know Before Starting Sons of the Forest.
Maybe Things The Game Doesn't Tell You.
A little preparation so that we don't spend the first six hours unknowingly drinking sewage and punching trees.
The guides provided several useful pieces of information.
First:
Get to a 3D printer as soon as possible and make canteens.
Apparently, this prevents you having to drink untreated water and getting dysentery.
Because, unsurprisingly, the cannibals have not invested heavily in municipal sanitation.
Second:
Build defences before shelter.
This struck us as an unusual recommendation.
Normally, survival games encourage the player to build a small hut, light a cheerful fire and begin the gentle process of gathering resources.
Sons of the Forest apparently prefers:
Before considering somewhere to sleep, build fortifications because THEY ARE COMING.
Third:
There is coffee.
Good.
There is vodka.
Also good.
There is no beer.
Civilisation has clearly collapsed.
There were other recommendations.
Blah, blah, gather things, craft things, explore things.
Wait.
Did that guide say cannibals?
What sort of tropical resort paradise island had we crashed on?
And more importantly:
Would we actually enjoy Sons of the Forest?
The CCF Fun Equation
Every new CCF game must pass a simple mathematical test.
The amount of Fun must exceed the combined volume of:
Craig's moaning + Myles's swearing + Zaph's motion sickness + Dave's boredom.
This is less a formula and more a warning label.
Fortunately, Sons of the Forest appeared to offer something for everybody.
Craig Fun Possibilities
Craig discovered that there are no vertical building limits.
This was extremely concerning.
You can build tree houses.
You can connect them with rope walkways.
You can build zip lines.
And there is an enormous mountain.
Somewhere in Craig's brain, a construction project was already being designed which would eventually require its own weather system.
Dave Fun Possibilities
The guide specifically says:
Gather everything.
Dave required no further convincing.
There are plants to collect.
There are crops to grow.
There is coffee.
There is vodka.
There are zip lines.
There are houseboats.
Essentially, someone had built a survival game around Dave's natural instinct to wander into the undergrowth and return forty minutes later carrying seventeen mushrooms, some leaves and an object nobody else knew existed.
Myles Fun Possibilities
There are hang gliders.
There are electric bikes.
There is no in-game cash economy, other than money you can find and apparently use to light fires.
Excellent.
No spreadsheets.
No shopkeepers.
No careful economic optimisation.
The medicine is even premade.
Myles doesn't have to construct antibiotics from berries, sulphur and the powdered toenail of an endangered yak.
We just have to find it.
And there are maps.
And GPS.
Surely nothing could go wrong.
Zaph Fun Possibilities
Golf carts.
Hang gliders.
Animals to hunt.
Fish to catch.
Cannibals to shoot.
Zaph's requirements had been met with admirable efficiency.
So Is Night-Time Fun in Sons of the Forest?
No.
Next question.
The game apparently gives new players a short grace period.
For the first two nights, cannibals don't attack.
This would have been useful information to experience personally.
Unfortunately, Dave was otherwise occupied and didn't join us until around 9pm.
By the time he arrived, it was Night 4.
The house was a one-room log cabin.
The palisade was unfinished.
There were no traps.
Large parts of the camp possessed the defensive integrity of a garden shed after a moderately aggressive possum encounter.
And the cannibals were swarming.
This was also when we discovered something curious about the basic survival axe.
It can fell a tree.
A whole tree.
A large tree.
You can swing it into several feet of solid timber and eventually bring the entire thing crashing to the ground.
Swing it at a cannibal, however, and it appears to be made from Nerf.
The axe bounces off.
The cannibal punches you.
You fall over.
And you wake up tied to a log in a cannibal camp, presumably waiting to become the evening special.
No problem.
Grab the knife.
Cut yourself free.
Find your gear.
Return to base.
Get punched again.
Wake up tied to another log.
Escape again.
Return to base.
Repeat.
CCF had discovered the island's first public transport network.
Dave had been playing for approximately thirty minutes when he delivered his initial assessment:
"this game sucks, I want to quit and find something fun to do."
A promising start.
Eventually, somehow, Night 4 ended.
The sun rose.
We had survived.
Technically.
Day 5 – Dave Mutinies
Dave woke early on Day 5 and surveyed the camp.
The walls were damaged.
The traps were half-built.
Several defensive structures existed chiefly as conceptual art.
Breakfast was fish.
Again.
Something inside Dave broke.
Rather than spend another day participating in the defence of Fort Questionable, he simply left.
Dave went walkabout.
He persuaded Zaph to head out exploring as well, and soon the two of them were roaming the island.
Dave picked berries.
Dave avoided cannibals.
Dave ate mushrooms.
Dave drank from streams.
The warnings concerning dysentery apparently no longer mattered because freedom has a price.
For a brief, shining moment, life was good.
Zaph headed off in another direction.
Then Zaph found a golf cart.
Things were definitely looking up.
Night 5 – Raft Time
As the sun started falling, Dave and Zaph headed back towards camp.
The news was not encouraging.
Progress on the base had been slow.
Very slow.
The fortifications still did not look remotely capable of surviving another night.
And the cannibals get progressively worse.
Dave assessed the situation with the calm strategic insight of an experienced survival-game veteran.
There was only one solution.
Raft.
If the cannibals were on land, then logically we should stop being on land.
Dave convinced Zaph that this was the future of CCF defensive doctrine.
Dave laid out the blueprint.
Zaph chopped trees.
And before long, the good raft lollypop was floating serenely on the calm ocean, tethered to shore by a rope.
Craig and Myles joined them.
Four hardened adventurers.
Veterans of alien planets, fantasy kingdoms and the grim darkness of the far future.
Huddled together on a small raft just offshore.
Waiting for bedtime.
The cannibals arrived.
They swarmed up and down the beach.
They ran backwards.
They ran forwards.
They glared at us.
They presumably discussed local zoning regulations.
But they couldn't reach us.
For the first time since arriving on the island, CCF had constructed a defensive system that actually worked.
Our revolutionary technological breakthrough was:
water.
Day 6 – Houseboat and Exploring
The small raft had been successful.
Dave therefore immediately invoked the ancient engineering principle known as bigger-is-better.
If a raft was good, then obviously what we needed was a houseboat.
Dave slapped down a blueprint.
Zaph chopped trees.
Dave and Craig built the houseboat.
Myles stayed at camp working on traps, presumably trying to make land once again vaguely habitable.
Eventually the houseboat was completed.
It had walls.
It had space.
It floated.
By CCF construction standards this was practically the Sydney Opera House.
Dave then made an important tactical error.
He left Craig unsupervised.
Dave and Zaph headed out exploring, hoping to finally locate a 3D printer so we could manufacture the canteens required to purify water.
The mission was unsuccessful.
Eventually, however, we identified the underlying navigational problem.
Dave had been reading the map wrong.
This turns out to make finding things surprisingly difficult.
Cartographers have been warning humanity about this for centuries.
Night 6 – Hiding in a Houseboat
The houseboat proved even better than the raft.
Not because it possessed terrifying weapon systems.
Not because we'd developed superior fortifications.
Not because Craig had somehow invented naval artillery.
The cannibals simply couldn't see us inside it.
And if the cannibals couldn't see us, they didn't swarm the beach.
And if they didn't swarm the beach, they didn't attack the camp.
CCF had finally perfected stealth technology.
It looked remarkably like four men hiding in a wooden box floating ten metres offshore.
Day 7 – The Scenic Tour
Now that we had finally worked out where we were on the map, we had a much better idea where we needed to go.
So we climbed into the golf buggy.
Dave drove.
The plan was simple.
Find a dirt trail.
Follow it in roughly the correct direction.
Reach the destination.
Unfortunately, Sons of the Forest contains trees.
Many trees.
Also rocks.
Dave merely wanted a dirt trail headed in the right direction.
The island repeatedly insisted on placing large immovable objects between the golf cart and Dave's preferred interpretation of geography.
Eventually we stopped at a burial site.
Naturally, we looted it.
Bones.
Cloth.
Rope.
A virtual treasure trove of useful bits.
We even found a coffin containing cash.
Actual paper money.
This is surprisingly useful in Sons of the Forest because you can burn it.
American paper currency finally discovers its ultimate survivalist purpose.
Australian polymer banknotes would be considerably less useful.
You can't light a fire with Australian plastic currency.
The local cannibals, however, objected to our archaeological methodology.
Apparently, "finders keepers" is not recognised under island burial law.
They attacked.
We jumped into the golf buggy and attempted to flee.
This was when we discovered two important details about golf-cart operation.
First:
Cannibals can knock passengers off the back.
Second:
Trees can knock everybody else out of the buggy.
Especially when you don't dodge them.
There was a collision.
There was darkness.
And once again, all four members of the Crypt Creep Forces woke up strapped to logs.
At this point we were becoming familiar with the escape procedure.
Knife.
Rope.
Gear.
Run.
Someone really should have started a loyalty card.
We continued driving.
Eventually we travelled a fair distance and discovered hang gliders sitting on top of a cliff.
Excellent.
We loved hang gliders in Enshrouded.
Everyone grabbed one.
Then we discovered that Sons of the Forest hang gliders are somewhat less forgiving.
The scientific process used to establish this consisted primarily of Zaph jumping off a cliff.
Zaph plummeted to the ground.
Observation recorded.
Experiment complete.
We packed the gliders away and filed the entire subject under:
Lesson for another day.
Our target location was close to the ocean, so rather than continue, we headed home with a new plan.
Tomorrow we would return.
In the houseboat.
Day 8 – Perhaps There Is a Closer Location
The next day somebody looked at the map again.
Properly.
It turned out there was another bunker.
Much closer.
Located not very far away.
Up a stream.
Excellent.
The previous day's cross-island expedition had therefore been an extended sightseeing tour with added grave robbery.
We set off on foot.
Zaph ran ahead.
Dave occupied the middle of the group, picking berries as he went.
Myles and Craig were tailgate Charlie, bringing up the rear.
Eventually we found a digger.
It didn't work.
We found three golf buggies.
Two didn't work.
One did.
So naturally we looted the other two for parts.
Myles eventually found the bunker.
Success.
There was just one minor problem.
We needed a shovel to get inside.
A shovel.
A stick with a shaped piece of material on the end.
Human civilisation invented versions of this concept thousands of years ago.
In Icarus, stranded on a hostile alien world, CCF could manufacture an astonishing array of tools from raw materials.
In Sons of the Forest, apparently, the combined engineering expertise of Dave, Zaph, Myles and Craig is insufficient to invent digging.
We had to find one.
Somewhere.
On the island.
Of course we did.
Tonight's CCF Campfire Song
By this stage we had established several important themes.
We were Crypt Creeps.
We were hunters.
We were gatherers.
We were lumberjacks.
We spent an extraordinary amount of time chopping trees.
And nearly everything wanted to eat us.
So the evening campfire naturally required an original CCF anthem:
Some people know us as the Crypt Creeps,
Four professionals, more or less.
We hunt, we gather, we flatten forests,
Then somehow call the result "progress".
Don't drink the creek,
Don't eat the meat,
Don't wave at cannibals,
And wipe your muddy feet.
Chop, chop, chop, another tree goes down,
Chop, chop, chop, we've cleared half the town,
Chop, chop, chop, Craig needs seventeen more,
Chop, chop, chop — what was the forest for?
It was beautiful.
Possibly not musically.
But spiritually.
Did We Learn or Achieve Anything This Week?
Yes.
Technically.
We Learnt That We Miss Icarus
This came as something of a surprise.
Icarus contains hostile alien wildlife, storms, predators, poisonous creatures and enormous monsters that occasionally emerge from the ground with the express purpose of ruining your evening.
And yet:
Wild animals beat cannibals any day of the week.
Icarus has better defences.
Night is survivable.
You can craft basic equipment.
If you require a simple tool, the game generally assumes your character possesses the intellectual capacity to attach one object to another.
Sons of the Forest has apparently decided the shovel is sacred technology.
We Learnt About Zaph's Driving
Having Zaph drive is like having a driver with their eyes closed.
Every tree becomes something to bounce off.
Every rock is a slalom gate.
And a creek is not an obstacle.
A creek is an opportunity to investigate whether golf carts float.
This is science.
We Learnt That Cannibals Can't Swim
This is perhaps the single most strategically useful fact discovered all week.
Forget fortifications.
Forget traps.
Forget weapons.
Forget the elaborate palisade Craig may eventually finish.
Water defeats cannibals.
Our most sophisticated defence system remains standing somewhere wet.
We Learnt That Golf Buggies Are Faster Than Cannibals
This is excellent news.
With one minor qualification.
Golf buggies are faster than cannibals provided you don't keep stopping for trees.
This qualification has proven operationally significant.
Achievement Unlocked
Despite everything, every member of CCF achieved:
Survivor – Survive Day 1
Admittedly, we're now on Day 8.
And we spent several nights hiding offshore.
And all four of us have repeatedly woken up tied to logs in cannibal camps.
And Dave wanted to quit after thirty minutes.
And we still don't have a canteen.
And we still haven't successfully entered a bunker.
And apparently the technological pinnacle of our civilisation is currently a shovel we cannot manufacture.
But the achievement says Survivor.
So officially:
Mission accomplished.
Tune in next week to discover whether the Crypt Creeps can actually locate a bunker, manufacture a canteen, find the mythical shovel and perhaps spend one complete evening without becoming somebody else's dinner.
Or whether Craig discovers those unlimited vertical building rules.
Frankly, the cannibals may be the smaller problem.
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