One of the best things a survival game can do is make you want to share your latest experiences with your family and friends At this, Sons Of The Forest succeeds in grand fashion. Often I found myself pausing the game so I could go find my brother and tell him about the latest Big Thing that had just happened. Some of the time, it's even for the right reasons. Perhaps I'd spotted a group of cannibals adopting some startlingly intelligent behaviour. Or maybe one of my NPC companions had just done something particularly endearing in front of me.
Or, more likely, I'd witnessed another example of the incredible jankiness which, like the island's flesh-nibbling denizens, loves to raid and pillage its way through nearly every aspect of the game. Perhaps I'd just cut down a tree and watched it soar high into the air, glitching all over the place like some demonic new type of tree mutant. Maybe Kelvin had just taken my instruction to gather logs a bit too literally, and deconstructed the entire west side of my house while I wasn't looking.
Sons Of The Forest's great strength is its ability to utterly transport you into its threatening, unsettling, but genuinely beautiful world. It quickly builds up the player's trust until they're ready to wholeheartedly buy into what at times feels like the next generation of open-world survival and crafting games. But then, at least in its current Early Access state, it breaks that trust just as quickly with a melange of unintuitive systems, game-breaking bugs, and a painful lack of content that makes one of the most gorgeous environments in games feel awfully hollow after a while.