Games like The Forest

Both games hinge on the tension between survival and construction—you'll spend hours gathering resources in hostile territory, then retreat to your base to fortify and expand it while the world grows darker around you. This cycle creates the same rhythmic pressure: scavenging feels purposeful because every log and stone directly feeds your shelter's growth.

The co-op foundation reinforces this experience in identical ways. Playing with a partner transforms base-building from a solitary task into negotiation and role-specialization, where one player scouts while the other fortifies, amplifying both the atmosphere and the stakes of each venture into the wilderness.

Where Sons Of The Forest pivots is tone: the horror elements cut deeper and more consistently, leaning into dread rather than the occasional shock. If grinding felt like a slog in The Forest, Sons rewards exploration more generously, reducing the drag of resource hunting without eliminating its weight.

Best for players who loved the building-and-survival loop but wanted the world itself to feel more oppressive, and who appreciate a co-op partner to share both the burden and the discovery.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Sons Of The Forest.

Both games thrive on that solo scramble for survival where every new tool changes how you move through a hostile world. In Subnautica, the same loop of scavenging, crafting, and pushing deeper into danger keeps the pressure on while rewarding careful preparation and bold exploration.

Like The Forest, it blends open-world survival crafting, base-building, and first-person exploration into a constant cycle of risk and reward. The underwater setting gives every journey a clear purpose: you dive for resources, return to improve your shelter, then venture farther because your upgrades finally make the unknown survivable.

The big tradeoff is tone: instead of horror rooted in mutants and combat, Subnautica turns tension into isolation, depth, and limited oxygen. That change freshens the formula while also addressing one common complaint from The Forest fans — it offers a more focused, story-driven progression with less of the messy grind and instability that can drag survival games down.

Best for players who want exploration and crafting to feel dangerous, not cozy.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Subnautica.

Both games thrive on the constant pressure of an impending sunset that shifts the power balance from hunter to hunted. You will find yourself frantically gathering supplies before the light fades, mirroring the dash back to a safe house when the cannibals begin their patrol.

This scavenge-to-survive loop demands that you treat the world as a giant toolkit. Because every weapon blueprint requires specific components found in dangerous interiors, looting becomes a tactical puzzle that rewards the same environmental awareness needed to survive the peninsula.

While the horror elements share a pulse, Dying Light trades static base-building for high-velocity parkour. This offers a fresh alternative to the resource grinding often found in traditional survival sims by making traversal through the world a rewarding, skill-based experience.

Best for players who value kinetic momentum over permanent fortifications.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Dying Light.

That compulsive loop of scavenging, building, and bracing for the next threat that drives The Forest is alive and well in Raft — just relocated from dense woodland to an endless, shark-patrolled ocean.

Both games demand first-person crafting and base construction as survival lifelines, not optional side systems. In Raft, expanding your floating platform creates the same escalating stakes as fortifying your treehouse camp — every new structure opens new needs, and the world pushes back harder the more you grow. The co-op framework also carries over cleanly, with coordinated building and resource runs rewarding the same kind of two-player synergy The Forest does well.

The meaningful shift is tone: Raft trades horror and predatory AI for a brighter, more puzzle-driven survival experience. Players who found The Forest's cannibal encounters more stressful than fun may actually appreciate the change.

The grinding criticism that follows The Forest applies here too, so go in with patience — but the resource loop is tighter and less padded. Best for co-op players who want survival crafting without the dread.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Raft.

Both games trap you in hostile wilderness where resource scarcity forces constant decision-making—every crafted tool and built shelter represents a calculated bet against hunger, injury, and environment. This creates the same psychological tension: you're never truly safe, only temporarily prepared.

The co-op survival loop works identically in both: scavenge, craft, build defenses, survive the night. Green Hell mirrors The Forest's base-building depth, but strips away combat encounters to focus purely on managing your body's needs (hunger, sanity, illness). This makes survival feel less about fighting threats and more about outsmarting the jungle itself.

Where they diverge: Green Hell trades The Forest's horror-action pacing for a slower, more methodical grind. This isn't a weakness—it's a longer endurance test that rewards patience over reflexes, offering substantially more playtime for those who didn't feel The Forest pushed their survival skills hard enough.

Best for players who crave mastery through trial-and-error, who want co-op survival without combat, and who can tolerate a steeper learning curve for deeper mechanical systems.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Green Hell.

The primary link is the meticulous base-building loop, where gathering resources to fortify a defensive perimeter against incoming waves is the essential path to survival. Both titles emphasize this frantic cycle of construction followed by desperate combat, which keeps the tension levels consistently high.

You lose the gritty, claustrophobic body horror of The Forest for a suburban, insect-sized perspective that feels far less grounded in visceral fear. While The Forest leans into cannibalistic dread, Grounded replaces it with the unpredictable, high-stakes threat of nature’s deadliest predators.

Pick this up if you crave complex engineering and co-op cooperation but can live without the unsettling, mature imagery of a stranded plane crash survivor.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Grounded.

Both The Forest and BIGFOOT emphasize tense 2-player online co-op survival with a first-person atmospheric approach. This shared dynamic fuels intense teamwork amid hostile wilderness, ramping up player immersion.

BIGFOOT leans further into psychological horror and multiple endings, adding narrative complexity that deepens replayable strategies.

The tradeoff is that BIGFOOT’s focus on supernatural elements and PvP shifts the tone from The Forest’s grounded violence to a more stylized horror experience.

Pick BIGFOOT if you want co-op survival with eerie psychological twists but can live without The Forest’s raw survival brutality and realism.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to BIGFOOT.

Both games drop you into hostile first-person worlds where crafting, base-building, and zombie hordes demand cooperation in online co-op.

7 Days to Die layers on tower defense mechanics—the undead assault your base on a timed cycle, making every structure a tactical choice rather than optional shelter.

Visually rougher and plagued by optimization issues, 7 Days to Die trades The Forest's atmospheric polish for deeper procedural survival systems.

Pick this up if you want aggressive base-defense survival with near-infinite replayability but can live without polished atmosphere.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to 7 Days to Die.

Both games center on zombie survival in first-person open worlds with cooperative multiplayer — you're scavenging, crafting, and staying alive alongside friends.

Unturned layers in PvP and trading mechanics, which deepens player interaction beyond pure co-op survival.

The tradeoff: The Forest prioritizes narrative and atmospheric tension, while Unturned is sandbox-focused with minimal story and relies heavily on community-driven play.

Pick Unturned if you want a free, grind-heavy survival experience but can accept weaker storytelling and a less polished technical foundation than The Forest.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Unturned.

The shared backbone of Backrooms: Escape Together and The Forest is the claustrophobic co-op survival loop, where coordinating with a partner is the only way to avoid total annihilation. This reliance on teamwork matters because it turns simple exploration into a high-stakes test of communication.

While The Forest focuses on terrestrial base-building and crafting against tribal threats, this title traps you in disorienting, procedurally generated labyrinths where sanity and environmental navigation take priority. You trade the freedom of an open island for the relentless, surreal tension of endless liminal spaces.

Pick this up if you want intense, shared survival horror but can live without the complex logistical grind of constructing a permanent shelter.

If you enjoyed this game, see our list of games similar to Backrooms: Escape Together.