The 11 Best Games Like Sons Of The Forest, Ranked

Sons of the Forest is that friend who invites you on a “relaxing camping trip” and then casually introduces cannibals, creepy caves, and a full-on base-building renovation show.
If you’ve already crash–landed, built the mega-fortress of your dreams, and survived more mutant ambushes than you can count, you’re probably wondering:
what are the best games like Sons of the Forest?

Good news: you don’t have to give up that mix of survival, horror, crafting, and “who just screamed in voice chat?” chaos. Below, we’ll rank
the 11 best games like Sons of the Forest based on how well they match its core ingredients:

• Open-world survival with real stakes
• Crafting and base-building that actually matter
• Co-op mayhem (or solo suffering, your call)
• Horror or at least serious “something’s watching me” vibes

This list pulls from survival–game roundups and comparison guides from major gaming outlets and PC survival communities, plus a healthy dose of player chatter about
what really feels like Sons of the Forest in the long run.

What Makes a Game “Like” Sons of the Forest?

Not every survival game makes the cut. To feel genuinely similar to Sons of the Forest, a game generally needs:

• First- or close third-person immersion – you should feel like you’re there, shivering by the campfire.
• Meaningful crafting and base-building – not just a token hut, but real defenses, storage, and upgrades.
• Hostile environments – whether it’s cannibals, wildlife, weather, or the ocean itself.
• Exploration and progression – new areas, blueprints, gear, and mysteries that keep you pushing forward.
• Optional or built-in co-op – because screaming together is better than screaming alone.

With that in mind, let’s start from #11 and work our way up to the closest cousin to Sons of the Forest.

The 11 Best Games Like Sons of the Forest, Ranked

#11 – Raft

If Sons of the Forest is “stranded in a cursed forest with cannibals,” Raft is “stranded on a floating pallet with a shark that hates you personally.”
It trades dense woods for endless ocean, but keeps that same loop: gather scraps, craft better tools, expand your base, and try not to get eaten.

You start on a tiny raft and slowly turn it into a floating fortress packed with farming plots, purification systems, storage, and cozy décor. Co-op shines here: one friend
steers, another fishes, someone else fends off the shark, and that one guy is inexplicably building a second story instead of helping. Sound familiar?

There’s less horror and more tension, but if you love Sons of the Forest’s resource grind and base-building, Raft gives those systems a fresh setting with the same
“we’re barely hanging on” energy.

#10 – The Long Dark

The Long Dark is like Sons of the Forest if you stripped out the mutants and said, “You know what? The weather will kill you just fine.” Set in the frozen Canadian wilderness after a geomagnetic disaster,
it’s a brutally realistic survival sim with permadeath, scarce resources, and constant risk of freezing, starving, or being mauled by wolves.

While it doesn’t lean into monsters or base-building the way Sons of the Forest does, it nails the feeling of desperation. You’re hunting, scavenging, and carefully managing calories, warmth, and fatigue.
Every fire you light and every shelter you reach feels like a victory. Survival game roundups consistently highlight The Long Dark as one of the most atmospheric and unforgiving experiences out there.

If you love the survival elements of Sons of the Forest and want something slower, moodier, and more grounded in realism, this one deserves a spot in your library.

#9 – Ark: Survival Evolved

In Ark: Survival Evolved, you wake up nearly naked on a mysterious island, start punching trees, and eventually graduate from wooden spears to taming dinosaurs and flying around on a pteranodon like a prehistoric superhero.
Structurally, it’s very similar to Sons of the Forest: gather, craft, build bases, explore, and fend off terrifying threats.

Ark is heavier on progression and much more sci-fi and dino-centric than Sons of the Forest’s grounded horror. But if what you love most is:

• Huge maps packed with secrets and biomes
• Deep crafting and tech trees
• Massive, upgradeable bases
• Chaotic multiplayer servers

…Ark hits those notes hard. It comes up repeatedly in “games like The Forest” and survival compilations and remains a staple of the genre for a reason.

#8 – Conan Exiles

Conan Exiles takes the survival-crafting blueprint and drops it into the brutal, barbaric world of Conan the Barbarian. Instead of cannibals and mutants, you’re dealing with harsh deserts, deadly creatures, rival clans,
and gods who don’t care that you just spent an hour gathering stone.

Like Sons of the Forest, Conan Exiles leans into:

• Freeform base-building with impressive structural freedom
• Dangerous exploration with meaningful loot and dungeons
• Co-op or PvP where your base can be your sanctuaryor your weak point

It’s less horror, more dark fantasy and brutality, but the moment-to-moment survival and building loop will feel familiar if you’re used to fortifying a forest clearing
and praying nothing wipes it out overnight.

#7 – Rust

Want the stress of Sons of the Forest, but with more trash talk and rocket raids at 3:00 a.m.? Rust is your game. It takes the survival-crafting formula and throws it into a harsh, always-online PvP sandbox where
the scariest monsters are other players.

You’ll farm resources, construct bases, craft weapons, and slowly climb the tech treeonly to log in the next day and discover that your neighbors decided your house looked better as rubble.
Rust often appears in survival-game lists alongside The Forest thanks to its intense stakes and incredible stories that emerge from its systems.

If you loved the base-defense side of Sons of the Forest, Rust turns that dial to 11. Just be ready for betrayal, ambushes, and learning that “friendly” on voice chat usually means “you have something I want.”

#6 – Grounded

Imagine Sons of the Forest, but you’re the size of an ant and the cannibals have been replaced by giant spiders and angry beetles. Grounded shrinks you down into a suburban backyard, turning blades of grass into trees
and soda cans into dungeons.

Under the cute premise is a surprisingly deep survival game:

• Base-building across branches, walls, and makeshift fortresses
• Crafting armor, weapons, and tools from insect parts and scavenged junk
• Exploration full of secrets, labs, and story beats

While it leans more whimsical than horrifying (unless you have arachnophobia, in which case: surprise horror!), Grounded scratches the same itch as Sons of the Forest’s co-op survival and shared building projects,
just in a completely different scale and setting.

#5 – Subnautica

With Subnautica, the forest is gone and the ocean is your new worst enemy. Stranded on an alien water world, you’re scavenging wreckage, crafting tools, building deep-sea habitats, and slowly descending into darker,
more dangerous biomes filled with creatures that really want you to stop exploring.

Like Sons of the Forest, Subnautica is:

• Exploration-driven, with new blueprints and zones rewarding your curiosity
• Crafting-heavy, as you build vehicles, bases, and survival gear
• Genuinely tensegoing deeper feels thrilling and terrifying at the same time

It’s single-player only, but when survival-focused guides and player threads talk about games that capture that “isolated, hostile world” feeling, Subnautica is almost always in the conversation.

#4 – Valheim

Valheim is what you get if you mix Viking mythology with cozy co-op building and then sprinkle in the occasional boss fight that absolutely obliterates your whole squad.
You’re dropped into a stylized, procedurally generated world where you chop trees, mine ore, sail between biomes, and slowly build massive longhouses and fortified villages.

While it isn’t horror, it shares Sons of the Forest’s:

• Strong co-op focus (2–10 players works beautifully)
• Base-building that goes from “tiny shack” to “full Viking compound”
• High-stakes explorationnew biomes are deadly until you gear up properly

Survival roundups consistently highlight Valheim as one of the best examples of progression-based survival right now, especially if you enjoy building and long-term server worlds with friends.

#3 – 7 Days to Die

7 Days to Die asks a simple question: “What if your Sons of the Forest base got attacked not just by mutants, but by entire waves of zombies every seven nights?” It combines survival, crafting, voxel-based building,
and tower-defense mechanics into one long, desperate scramble to fortify before the next blood moon.

You’ll spend your days:

• Looting towns, farms, and bunkers
• Scrapping junk into better gear
• Upgrading bases with traps, spikes, and reinforced walls

Then night falls, and all chaos breaks loose. While its visual style is rougher around the edges, its mechanical depth and emergent co-op gameplay are exactly what many Sons of the Forest fans are looking for when they want more survival-horror crafting.

#2 – Green Hell

Green Hell is what happens when you crank up the realism and drop Sons-of-the-Forest-style survival into the Amazon rainforest. You’re dealing with hunger, thirst, injuries, infections, parasites, mental health,
and wildlife that is aggressively not on your side.

It’s frequently highlighted in “games like Sons of the Forest” lists thanks to:

• Brutally realistic survival systems – crafting bandages, treating wounds, checking your body for leeches.
• Jungle atmosphere – dense foliage, oppressive audio, and constant threats.
• Co-op support – you can suffer through all of this with friends.

There are fewer mutant hordes and more “I forgot to boil that water and now I’m dying,” but if you love the tense, survival-first gameplay of Sons of the Forest, Green Hell might be your next obsession.

#1 – The Forest

This might feel obvious, but it’s true: The Forest is still the closest game to Sons of the Forestbecause, of course, it’s the original. Most “games like Sons of the Forest” lists put it at or near the top
for a reason.

You get:

• The same blend of survival, horror, and crafting
• Terrifying cannibal AI and unsettling encounters
• Deep cave systems and story-driven exploration
• Base-building that rewards creativity and paranoia

Sons of the Forest builds on and modernizes The Forest, but the original still holds up extremely well, especially in co-op. If somehow you jumped straight to the sequel without playing The Forest, going back is absolutely worth it.
It’s like revisiting the pilot season of your favorite horror survival showlower budget, but fantastic ideas and unforgettable moments.

How to Pick the Right Sons of the Forest–Style Game for You

Not every game on this list scratches the same itch. Here’s a quick cheat sheet based on what you love most about Sons of the Forest:

• Love the horror and mutants? Try The Forest, 7 Days to Die, Subnautica (ocean horror), or Green Hell for intensity.
• Obsessed with building elaborate bases? Check out Valheim, Rust, Ark, or Conan Exiles.
• Want co-op chaos with friends? Valheim, Grounded, Raft, Ark, and Rust are all excellent picks.
• Prefer hardcore survival and realism? Green Hell and The Long Dark will keep you sweating.
• Craving exploration and atmosphere? Subnautica, The Long Dark, and, of course, The Forest deliver.

You don’t need to pick just one. Many Sons of the Forest fans rotate between a “main” co-op survival world and a solo save in something like The Long Dark or Subnautica for those nights when you just want to suffer quietly in peace.

Player Experiences: What It’s Really Like to Jump Between These Games

On paper, all of these titles share similar tags: survival, crafting, base-building, co-op. In practice, the feel of each game can be wildly different, and that’s where long-time Sons of the Forest players notice the biggest contrasts.

Coming from Sons of the Forest, the first thing you’ll probably notice in another survival game is how it treats risk vs. reward. In The Forest and its sequel, pushing into caves, exploring new parts of the map,
and hunting for blueprints always carries the chance of a brutal ambushbut the payoff is huge. When you switch to Subnautica, that same feeling gets re-skinned as diving deeper: more pressure, weirder creatures, better loot,
and a constant “do I really want to go down there?” debate in your head.

In Green Hell, the tension is less about monsters and more about the slow grind of bad decisions. You might think you’re doing well until a small mistakelike ignoring a wound or drinking unboiled watersnowballs into a full-blown medical crisis.
For Sons of the Forest players who love micromanaging hunger, health, and injury, that granularity can feel incredibly satisfying, especially in co-op where everyone has to help patch each other up.

Jumping into Valheim or Grounded, you’ll probably feel a surprising sense of relief. These games still punish carelessness, but the tone is lighter. Instead of cannibals stalking your camp at night, you’re fending off trolls,
skeletons, mosquitoes, or oversized spiders in a world that feels more playful and mythic. Many Sons of the Forest veterans treat these games as “palate cleansers”still survival, still building, but with less psychological horror and more
“look at the ridiculous house we just built on this cliff.”

Games like Rust or Ark introduce a different kind of horror: other people. If your favorite part of Sons of the Forest is setting clever traps, building defensive walls, and preparing for attacks, these titles turn
that energy into a full-time lifestyle. You’re not just planning for AI raids; you’re planning for human unpredictabilityneighbors who might ally with you, betray you, or quietly scout your base before wiping it off the map at 4:00 a.m.
For some players, that social layer becomes the “true endgame” of survival gaming.

Then there are games like The Long Dark, which can feel almost meditative by comparison. Coming from a mutant-filled island, wandering through silent, snow-covered woods with no music, careful footsteps, and distant wolf howls is a different kind of eerie.
Instead of jump scares, you get slow-burn anxiety: Will this blizzard last all night? Do I have enough matches? Can I make it to the next shelter before dark? For Sons of the Forest fans, it’s a way to keep the survival tension but dial back the outright horror.

The big takeaway from players who hop between these titles is that you don’t have to chase a 1:1 clone of Sons of the Forest to get that same satisfaction. Instead, think of each game as emphasizing one part of the formula:

• Subnautica leans into exploration and atmosphere.
• Green Hell focuses on realism and complex survival systems.
• Valheim and Grounded highlight cooperative building and progression.
• Rust and Ark foreground social conflict and large-scale base warfare.
• The Forest keeps that classic mix of horror, crafting, and storytelling.

If you approach them as different “flavors” of the same core idea“you’re not safe, build something, and hope it holds”you’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of trying multiple games instead of searching for a perfect replacement.
Many long-time Sons of the Forest fans end up with a rotation: maybe a chill Valheim server with friends, a solo Subnautica save for quiet exploration, and a Rust or Ark world for when they’re in the mood for high drama and potential betrayal.

The best part? Skills transfer. Your instincts about chokepoints, resource routes, and defensive building from Sons of the Forest will absolutely help in other survival games. You’ll still panic, you’ll still make bad decisions, and you’ll still probably die to something dumbbut you’ll die
with a very well-designed base, and honestly, that’s what truly matters.

Conclusion

There may never be another game that feels exactly like Sons of the Forest, but there are plenty that deliver that same addictive cycle of gathering, building, surviving, and pushing just a little farther than you probably should.
Whether you want more horror, more realism, more co-op chaos, or just a new setting for your next over-engineered fortress, the 11 games on this list give you plenty of ways to keep living that survival-horror life.