There were only three of us for this week’s expedition into Sons of the Forest.
Dave was unavailable due to an unfortunate scheduling conflict involving a highly classified mission, several government agencies, and—according to sources who definitely shouldn’t be trusted—a llama.
This was unfortunate, because Dave is our Gatherer and Farmer, responsible for maintaining the thin veneer of agricultural civilisation separating us from four middle-aged men eating squirrels in a hut.
Nevertheless, duty called.
So it was down to Zaph, Craig and Myles.
Scout. Builder. Medic.
Or, translated into more practical terms: the man who knows where he’s going, the man most likely to attract everything hostile within three postcodes, and the man following behind wondering why everybody is bleeding.
A New World, More or Less
We decided to do something slightly different this time.
Rather than return to our main world, which had already reached around Day 10, we went back to an alternate world that Zaph had started and which was still only around Day 1 or 2.
This meant Craig and Myles had to join with completely fresh characters and essentially start again.
Normally, deliberately abandoning ten days of progress would be regarded as a setback.
In Sons of the Forest, it can also be regarded as strategic planning.
One thing we’d discovered about the game is that the longer you successfully survive, the more personally offended it becomes by your continued existence. As the days pass, the hostiles become increasingly numerous and unpleasant, presumably because word gets around the cannibal community that there are four idiots on the beach who have somehow survived another Tuesday.
Our original game had therefore reached the point where simply remaining alive was becoming a significant achievement.
So we decided on a different approach.
This time, we were going in armed with knowledge.
There is an interactive map available on the internet that reveals the locations of bunkers, equipment, caves and various other useful things scattered around the island.
Previously, we’d been stumbling around largely blind, exploring the island as nature intended: by wandering into forests, falling off things and discovering important locations shortly after being attacked there.
Now we had intelligence.
The online map would become our secret weapon.
Or, at the very least, give us some idea where we were going before something tried to eat us.
Learning to Fly
Our first objective was mobility.
Zaph had constructed a small raft, which we used to travel down the beach and around the coast, heading anticlockwise towards an inlet.
This was already considerably more sophisticated than our normal travel arrangements. Nobody was swimming. Nobody had driven a golf cart into the ocean. Craig had not constructed a bridge to somewhere that didn’t need a bridge.
We were learning.
From the inlet, we made our way towards a mountain bluff.
According to our illicit intelligence source, there was a hang-glider location at the top.
Zaph already had one, so Craig and Myles collected gliders of their own.
Then we had to learn how to fly them.
This took a little experimentation, particularly for Craig, who initially struggled to gain altitude.
The problem, it turned out, was that we had mistakenly assumed the hang-gliders operated according to the conventional laws of aerodynamics.
They do not.
In the real world, gliders are aircraft without engines. They exchange altitude for forward velocity and, absent rising air, gradually descend towards an inconvenient meeting with the ground.
In Sons of the Forest, apparently nobody told the physics engine.
You pitch the glider down to gain speed.
Then you pull up.
And somehow you gain more altitude than you lost.
Then you point down again.
Then up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Repeat this process several times and, rather than gradually descending towards the ground like an actual glider, you can climb hundreds or perhaps even thousands of feet into the air.
The Wright brothers wasted their time.
All they needed to do was waggle the controls.
Once we’d mastered this particular violation of several well-established laws of physics, the entire island opened up beneath us.
We could fly almost anywhere.
This was transformational.
Mountains ceased to be obstacles. Forests ceased to be obstacles. Cannibals ceased to be obstacles.
Gravity had submitted a formal complaint and was awaiting a response from the developers.
There was, however, one slight navigational complication.
You can pull out the in-game GPS while flying, which is useful, but you can’t put your own markers on it.
So navigation involved looking at the online map, memorising where we thought something should be, then trying to mentally transpose that location onto the GPS while simultaneously piloting a hang-glider several thousand feet above an island populated by people who regard us as takeaway.
Somehow, we became surprisingly good at it.
This should probably have worried us.
The Bunker Problem
With our new airborne transport sorted, we decided a bunker would be a sensible place to begin our search for better equipment.
The southwest of the island was apparently one of the safer areas.
“Safer” being a relative term in Sons of the Forest, much as “lightly mauled” is preferable to “completely eaten.”
So we launched ourselves into the sky and flew across the island towards a bunker down there.
And it worked.
We navigated across an enormous landscape using our improvised combination of internet cartography, GPS interpretation and physically impossible aviation.
We found the bunker.
We landed.
We approached it.
We were competent.
This was unsettling.
Then we discovered we needed a passkey.
Bugger.
This was our first proper encounter with what increasingly appeared to be the central design philosophy of Sons of the Forest:
To get A, you need B.
To get B, you need C.
To get C, you need a shovel.
To get the shovel, you need something else.
And to get that, you probably need to spend an hour underground being pursued by mutants.
It is less a survival game and more an aggressively implemented corporate dependency graph.
Having achieved precisely nothing at Bunker Number One, we consulted our map and selected another bunker.
Back into the hang-gliders.
Unfortunately, the next destination turned out to be quite close to where we’d originally collected the gliders.
After flying halfway across the island, we now had to fly almost all the way back again.
Still, we had hang-gliders.
And by now we were experts.
Down.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Isaac Newton quietly sobbing somewhere in the seventeenth century.
Eventually we arrived and spotted a large tracked excavator or backhoe near the site.
Craig looked at it.
Something stirred within the vast and mysterious archive that Craig uses instead of conventional memory.
“Hang on. Didn’t we come here in the other world?”
There was a pause.
Actually…
Yes.
This did look familiar.
Craig then remembered the important bit.
“Wasn’t this the one where we needed a shovel?”
Zaph descended to investigate while Craig remained circling overhead.
Sure enough.
Shovel required.
Bugger again.
The Quest for the Thing We Need to Get the Thing We Need
Our bunker expedition had therefore transformed into The Quest for the Shovel.
Except, naturally, you can’t simply go and get the shovel.
That would be absurd.
There were other things we needed first.
Exactly what the complete dependency tree was became increasingly difficult to remember.
We wanted access to a bunker.
The bunker needed a passkey.
Something else needed a shovel.
The shovel needed other equipment.
And one of those required pieces of equipment was a rebreather.
This was rapidly becoming less Sons of the Forest and more The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, except instead of acquiring Permit A38 we were being sent underground to fight conjoined mutants.
The rebreather was in a cave.
So, into the cave we went.
This was where we began to realise just how much of Sons of the Forest takes place underground.
These aren’t little caves.
There is no jaunty ten-minute spelunk where you wander inside, pick up a shiny object, admire some stalactites and return to the surface in time for tea.
These are enormous systems of tunnels and chambers that can take a substantial amount of real-world time to traverse.
This expedition probably took us an hour.
The caves are also extremely dark.
And they are most definitely not empty.
As we moved deeper underground we started encountering the more disturbing mutant variants.
There were strange, almost Siamese-twin-like creatures: multiple limbs, bizarre movement and surprisingly difficult to kill.
There were tall mutants apparently missing their heads, which is the sort of anatomical problem that ought to significantly reduce combat effectiveness but apparently only makes them angry.
In the dark, confined tunnels, they were deeply unpleasant.
And this forced us to become much more deliberate about how we fought.
The pistol was useful, but ammunition was limited. Firing wildly at everything that moved might be emotionally satisfying, but eventually all you have left is an empty pistol and something with six legs sprinting towards you.
Grenades suddenly became valuable rather than something to hoard indefinitely for the mythical future emergency which, despite thirty years of gaming evidence, we always assume will be worse than the thing currently trying to kill us.
Flares weren’t just another object filling up the inventory.
Throw one into a cavern and suddenly you could see.
Admittedly, what you could see was often horrible.
But at least it was horrible and illuminated.
Slowly, we started learning how the game wanted us to play.
There’s Something in the Water
Eventually the cave opened into a large cavern containing a substantial body of water.
This seemed suspicious.
We’d come here looking for a rebreather.
And now we were standing beside a large underground lake.
Even Craig could probably have followed this particular piece of environmental storytelling, although someone may have needed to draw an arrow.
We found the rebreather.
Success.
Then, almost by accident, Myles noticed something moving through the water.
Something large.
Something with a fin.
A shark.
A very large shark.
Clearly, the intended escape route involved putting on our newly acquired scuba gear and swimming through the submerged cave system.
Clearly, the shark had reviewed this plan and identified several opportunities for stakeholder engagement.
So we waited until it came close enough to shore.
One pistol shot later, it sank to the bottom.
Problem solved.
It was almost disappointingly efficient.
No screaming.
No frantic swimming.
No Craig attempting to build a defensive structure underwater.
Just shark.
Pistol.
Dead shark.
Zaph would later demonstrate that this was not necessarily the only possible outcome of a shark encounter.
But that comes later.
We equipped the rebreathers, entered the water and followed the underwater passage.
Down into the darkness.
Through the submerged cave.
And eventually…
Daylight.
We emerged back outside onto the beach.
And that felt like a bit of a turning point.
We had gone into one of these enormous cave systems.
We’d dealt with the mutants.
We’d worked out how to use the equipment scattered around us.
We’d found the thing we needed.
We’d navigated an underwater tunnel.
And we had actually made it back out again.
Alive.
Maybe—just maybe—we were starting to understand how to play Sons of the Forest.
This confidence would naturally have to be punished.
Virginia Gets a Gun
We eventually returned to our base on the northern beach to regroup and improve the defences.
There we encountered our increasingly friendly mutant neighbour: Virginia.
Virginia is the mysterious woman with three arms and three legs who had been cautiously hanging around us.
In almost any other context, “the six-limbed mutant woman is hanging around the house again” would indicate that matters had deteriorated considerably.
On this island, she was rapidly becoming one of our better neighbours.
Zaph had apparently made some progress befriending her.
She had even brought him some aloe vera.
This was touching.
We’d also collected pistols and other equipment from the floating life raft a couple of hundred metres offshore from the beach.
According to what we’d read online, once Virginia trusted you, you could give her a firearm.
This raised several questions.
Most of them could wait.
More importantly, the rumours suggested that she didn’t consume your ammunition.
Naturally, this demanded an experiment.
We gave Virginia a pistol.
There are moments in human history where someone really ought to ask whether a particular technological development is wise.
This was not one of those moments.
Not long afterwards, a cannibal approached the base.
Virginia shot it.
Excellent.
The rumours were true.
We had somehow acquired a six-limbed, unlimited-ammunition base-defence system.
She didn’t need feeding.
She didn’t need ammunition.
She had already demonstrated greater situational awareness than Craig.
This seemed like progress.
Back Underground
The shovel was still waiting for us somewhere, however.
Our ridiculous chain of prerequisites wasn’t finished.
The rebreather was merely another checkbox in the great project plan that had started with the modest objective of “let’s go and look in a bunker.”
So it was back into the hang-gliders and off to yet another cave.
This cave was big.
Very big.
By now, though, we were starting to recognise something important about the way the caves were designed.
The game actually gives you a lot of equipment underground if you’re paying attention.
There were flares.
Food.
MRE packs.
Canned supplies.
Vodka bottles.
Canvas.
And various other useful resources scattered throughout the system.
The message seemed fairly clear:
Use this stuff.
Thirty years of RPG training had taught us the opposite.
Thirty years of gaming had taught us that every grenade should be saved for later, every potion should remain untouched until the credits roll, and every consumable should be carefully preserved for an emergency more serious than being trapped underground and attacked by malformed horrors.
Sons of the Forest was attempting an intervention.
So we did something radical.
We used our inventory.
Rather than relying almost entirely on our pistols, we started diversifying our arsenal.
Vodka bottles became Molotov cocktails.
Grenades were used when grenades were clearly the correct answer to the problem.
Flares helped us see what was waiting ahead.
And, increasingly, what was waiting ahead probably wished we hadn’t found all those grenades.
At one point we encountered an enormous, horrible, blobby mass of mutant flesh that appeared to be wedged into a narrow passage through the rocks.
It was huge.
It was disgusting.
And it was directly in our way.
Fortunately, it couldn’t reach us.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get past it.
There are complex tactical situations where Zaph’s precision shooting is invaluable.
There are situations where careful planning from Myles can save the group.
There are situations where Craig…
Well.
There are situations.
This was not a complex tactical situation.
This was a large quantity of meat blocking a narrow hole.
Fortunately, humanity solved this particular problem some centuries ago.
Grenade.
One explosion later, the passage was open.
Which was enormously satisfying.
Although it did raise an obvious question.
If that was blocking the entrance…
…what exactly was further inside?
We continued deeper.
And deeper.
And deeper.
The cave kept going.
And so did we.
There is something peculiar about exploring caves in games. Somewhere along the way you stop thinking about the fact that you’re kilometres underground beneath an island filled with cannibals and start regarding the next black tunnel as a perfectly reasonable place to investigate.
“Well, we’ve come this far.”
Possibly the last words of more doomed expeditions than any other phrase in human history.
Meanwhile, the clock in the real world continued inexorably towards midnight.
Eventually we had to admit defeat.
Not against the mutants.
Not against the cave.
Not even against the absurd multi-stage procurement process for one bloody shovel.
Against bedtime.
Some of us presumably had things to do the next morning.
Fortunately, Sons of the Forest allows you to construct what must surely be one of gaming’s least convincing campsites.
A tarpaulin.
Propped up with a stick.
That’s it.
No fortified room.
No defensible position.
No locked door.
Just a small piece of plastic arranged in the universally recognised architectural style of Please Do Not Eat Us While We Sleep.
So, somewhere deep in an enormous mutant-infested cave system, surrounded by creatures whose evolutionary history appeared to involve losing track of how many limbs a person normally has, we put up a tarp.
We saved the game.
And called it a night.
The shovel would have to wait.
We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat
There was one other incident during the night’s adventures that deserves mentioning.
Exactly when it happened has been lost to history.
Myles didn’t actually witness it, and nobody seems entirely certain where in the evening’s increasingly improbable sequence of events it belongs.
But at some point while we were travelling through the ocean shallows, Zaph encountered another shark.
Not the shark in the cave.
That shark had been handled professionally.
Observe target.
Wait for target.
Shoot target.
Proceed with dive.
This shark encounter followed a different tactical doctrine.
Zaph got eaten.
The game, displaying impeccable comedic timing, immediately rewarded him with an achievement:
“Need a Bigger Boat” — Get killed by a shark.
Which, apart from being magnificently unsympathetic, seemed an entirely appropriate reward.
And really, it seems as good a summary of our progress in Sons of the Forest as anything.
We started the night because our original world had become too dangerous.
So we restarted from almost Day 1.
We consulted an internet map.
We learned to fly by repeatedly violating the laws of aerodynamics.
We crossed the island looking for bunkers.
The bunkers sent us looking for a shovel.
The shovel sent us looking for other equipment.
The equipment sent us into enormous caves full of mutants.
We killed one shark.
Another shark killed Zaph.
We armed a three-legged woman with an infinite-ammunition pistol.
And at midnight, we went to sleep under a piece of plastic held up by a stick, somewhere deep underground, still looking for a shovel.
Dave missed all of this.
He’ll probably turn up next week, ask whether we’ve planted anything, and wonder why Zaph smells faintly of fish.
So yes.
We’re going to need a bigger boat.
Addendum: Corrections, Clarifications and Other Alleged Heroics
Following publication, several members of the expedition lodged formal complaints regarding inaccuracies, omissions and the suspicious absence of material that portrayed them in a favourable light.
The CCF Editorial Standards Committee—consisting largely of Myles and whoever happens to remember what actually happened—has therefore agreed to issue the following corrections.
Zaph and the Extremely Brief Shark Encounter
First, some clarification is required regarding Zaph’s “Need a Bigger Boat” achievement.
The original account suggested that Zaph had simply encountered a shark in the ocean shallows and been eaten.
Apparently this understated both the circumstances and the efficiency of the shark.
Zaph had already been beaten up by something in the cave and died. His resulting respawn point was, for reasons known only to the game’s sense of humour, underwater in the ocean.
He cut himself free, turned towards the beach and his backpack, and started swimming.
Still underwater.
He managed approximately three strokes.
Then a large great white appeared and ate him before he had any chance to react.
Which is less Jaws and more an administrative error followed immediately by a catering decision.
Zaph then respawned again at exactly the same underwater location.
Fortunately, the shark was otherwise occupied.
Presumably chewing on Zaph.
The previous Zaph.
This gave the replacement Zaph sufficient time to swim away, retrieve his possessions and continue the evening while trying not to contemplate the metaphysical implications of swimming past a shark eating your previous corpse.
The achievement was therefore not merely awarded for being killed by a shark.
It was awarded after the game respawned an already injured Zaph underwater, pointed him vaguely towards safety, and then introduced him to a great white approximately three swimming strokes later.
Fair enough, really.
Craig Would Like the Record Corrected
Craig also raised a serious concern regarding the original account.
“hah. no mention of my potentially brilliant use of the stick bomb. Would have been great if Zaph hasn't got in the way just to spoil my awesome level of composure in difficult environments, (ie) undergraound in a deep, dark and wet cave with Myles and Zaph.”
We believe Craig meant sticky bomb, rather than stick bomb.
Although, given Craig’s long and distinguished history of constructing things out of sticks, neither possibility could initially be ruled out.
The blog did indeed fail to mention Craig’s potentially brilliant use of a sticky bomb.
The word potentially is doing a considerable amount of structural work in that sentence.
Somewhere underground, in a deep, dark and wet cave, Craig decided that the appropriate response to whatever was troubling us was to attach explosives to it.
This, in itself, was not unreasonable.
Indeed, by this stage of the evening we had collectively arrived at the view that most cave-related problems could be improved by explosives.
Craig prepared his sticky bomb.
He had the target.
He had the explosive.
He had, by his own account, an awesome level of composure in a difficult environment.
Unfortunately, he also had Zaph.
Zaph inconveniently occupied part of the area into which Craig intended to introduce the explosive.
According to Craig, this ruined what would otherwise have been a demonstration of tactical brilliance.
According to other interpretations, Zaph’s desire not to become an unintended component of a sticky-bomb experiment in a confined underground cave may have represented entirely reasonable risk management.
History will decide.
And Then There Was the Grenade
More troublingly, Myles had also completely omitted one of Craig’s genuine successes.
As Myles subsequently admitted:
“And ... no mention of your most excellent use of the grenade that you lobbed - that killed the mutant in one shot, and none of us died. Strange how I forget some of these minor details... That's why we need Dave - he doesn't miss these details”
This also happened.
Craig lobbed a grenade.
It killed the mutant in one shot.
Nobody else died.
All three parts of that sequence deserve to be recorded because, statistically speaking, they are not necessarily outcomes one would automatically associate with Craig throwing explosives in an enclosed space.
There was a target.
The grenade went towards the target.
The mutant died.
Craig did not die.
Zaph did not die.
Myles did not die.
No supporting structure collapsed.
Nobody had to reload a save.
There are military organisations that would issue medals for less.
So the official historical record should reflect that Craig did, on at least one occasion that evening, employ a grenade with precision, restraint and a complete absence of collateral damage.
Naturally, Myles forgot to write it down.
Which really is why we need Dave.
Dave may wander off collecting reagents, plants, sticks, mushrooms and anything else that can be placed into an inventory, but apparently he also serves the vital function of CCF Combat Historian.
Without him, major battlefield accomplishments are forgotten, explosive incompetence is left insufficiently documented, and Zaph has to explain several days later that the shark didn't merely kill him—it spawn-camped him.
The Editorial Standards Committee regrets these omissions.
Craig presumably considers himself vindicated.
Zaph remains edible.
And Dave is still required back at work next week.
