Sons Of The Forest will release into early access after all

Cannibal and arboreal survival ’em up Sons Of The Forest was due to launch later this month, and it have not been delayed. It’s developers have announced that they’ve decided to release into Steam Early Access, however, after initially intending to head straight to 1.0.

“It’s been a long journey since we first started ‘Sons of The Forest’ development and it’s grown into the biggest most complex game we have ever made,” says the announcement. “There is still so much more we want to add; items, new mechanics, gameplay balance and more. We didn’t want to delay again so have instead decided to involve the community in the continued development of this project and keep our February 23rd release date but instead release in Early Access.”

As the announcement also says, an early access release worked out pretty well for its predecessor. The Forest launched as a barebones but visually impressive thing in 2014, then hit 1.0 in 2018 after selling millions of copies in the interim. You’ll find it among our picks for the best survival games.

I can’t tell from its Steam page what Sons Of The Forest does differently, but apparently it’ll have better building, improved AI and whatever these things are.

In any case, I have no problem with Early Access. It’s just nice when a game isn’t delayed, for a change.