The Forest

Endnight's survival horror game spent four years in early access before its 2018 release, and its premise is unusually direct: your plane crashes on a peninsula, your son is taken, and the people who live there are cannibals. What separates it from the survival crowd is that the cannibals are a society rather than a spawn table. They observe you, build effigies to frighten you, retreat when you kill enough of them, and escalate if you clear their camps - and they use the same paths you do. Building is genuinely good, with a blueprint system that lets you plan a treehouse or a defended compound and fill it in log by log, and full co-op means bases get ambitious. Underneath the peninsula is a cave network that turns into something closer to a horror game, and the actual plot resolves there. It is rough in places and the combat is loose, but the sense of being in someone else's territory is better realised here than in almost any of its imitators. Sons of the Forest followed in 2023.