The Forest

The cannibals in The Forest don't always attack right away. They watch from a distance, patrol around your camp, cover each other, drag their wounded to safety and sometimes surrender out of fear. The more aggressive you are, the fiercer their raids, while if you keep your distance the tribe can stay peaceful for a long time. The developers wanted players to ask themselves who the enemy is here.

Endnight Games drew on the films The Descent and Cannibal Holocaust and, oddly enough, on Disney, because they didn't want the game to be dark and depressing all the way through. The team came from film visual effects, and the starting budget was 125,000 dollars.

Co-op was added during early access. That lasted four years, and by November 2018 the game had sold more than 5.3 million copies on PC. One reviewer liked the enemies but found it too dark at times. Players give it 95% positive across 585,154 reviews, and critics 83 on Metacritic. On our Recommended Score it ranks 264 of 4,736 games.

Liked it? Try The Long Dark, where a pilot survives a crash in the frozen Canadian wilderness, and Green Hell, where an anthropologist searches the Amazon jungle for his missing wife.