Don't Starve Together
Our first choice for crafting-and-survival pressure with friends
Don't Starve Together keeps the crafting-and-survival pressure The Forest relies on, but lets you bring friends along from the start and reframes the threat through the series' gothic, hand-drawn art rather than The Forest's realistic horror. A shifting day-night cycle keeps every decision — gather more wood, or retreat before dark — feeling consequential.
We'd point a The Forest player here first for a player who wants the gathering-and-building rhythm with company, built for co-op rather than retrofitted onto it, with a tone that's stranger and often darkly funny instead of straightforwardly frightening.
Its top-down perspective is a big shift from The Forest's grounded first-person dread, and there's no equivalent to the mutant family actively hunting your base. The danger here comes from the world and the dark, not from something stalking you specifically.
The Long Dark
For survival with the threat stripped down to the elements
The Long Dark swaps The Forest's cannibal threat for an unforgiving wilderness where cold, hunger and fatigue are the real enemy, and we think it earns a place here for how seriously it takes the numbers behind simply staying alive.
We'd recommend it to a The Forest player who wants that same careful resource management, but without anything actively hunting them — the tension comes entirely from exposure and scarcity rather than from fending off an enemy.
There's no base-building against attackers here and no combat at all, so the specific dread of The Forest's mutant family doesn't carry over. Go in for the survival math, not for horror.
Mist Survival
For a steadier, more methodical kind of threat
Mist Survival trades The Forest's cannibal family for a post-outbreak world where dense mist can roll in at any time, carrying infected and bandits with it. You scavenge, craft, build and defend a camp, and you can persuade other survivors to join and then assign them rooms and gear.
We'd choose it for a The Forest player who liked the base-building-under-threat loop but wants a steadier, more survival-horror pace, with stealth around infected and bandits mattering as much as outright confrontation.
It's single-player only, with no co-op option at all, which is a real departure if you've been playing The Forest with a friend. The infected are also a different, slower kind of threat than The Forest's more volatile mutant encounters.
The Wild Eight
For a supernatural mystery you can explore as a group
The Wild Eight sends eight survivors of a mysterious plane crash into the frozen Alaskan wilderness, keeping The Forest's crafting-and-camp survival loop but wrapping it around a supernatural mystery you can dig into with online co-op for up to eight players.
We'd recommend it to a The Forest player who wants the same cycle of gathering materials, returning to camp and upgrading gear, but curious about a colder setting and a mystery that unfolds as you explore abandoned facilities and strange anomalies.
The cold replaces cannibals as the main threat, which changes the texture of danger considerably — this is about enduring an environment more than fending off a hunting family, even with its own supernatural edge layered on top.
Miscreated
For a rougher, more unpredictable multiplayer sandbox
Miscreated turns the survival-and-building loop The Forest runs on into an open-world multiplayer shooter, with mutated survivors to fight alongside crafting, base-building and player-versus-player conflict across a much larger online world.
We'd point a The Forest player here when the appeal was the base-building and crafting half of the loop, but they're curious what it feels like with other real players as the main unpredictable threat instead of a scripted mutant family.
The focus on PvP and a far larger, rougher online world trades The Forest's tighter, mostly co-op peninsula for something considerably less controlled. Expect a messier, more hostile multiplayer experience rather than The Forest's more contained horror story.
