The (New) Forest: First Update Adds Sharks, Better Ponds

Is an early access release shit? Not in The Forest. The survival horror survival sim is about building shelter and gathering food to survive against the elements, where one of those elements is "naked slick cannibals". Even in its first release it's a funtime, and now there's a new update coming today which introduces new features (sharks!) plus bug fixes.

As that post lists, there's a bunch of new, interesting features and tweaks. When you get knocked out the first time, you now wake up in a random cave, rather than the same cave each time, which is great. You can now build a simple raft and while there's no sail yet, that's the first step to being able to travel around the island more broadly. Plus, birds can now be killed with fire, and who doesn't think they've had it coming for a while now?

"Enemies will drag downed friends out of danger again" sounds like particularly neat behaviour for the cannibals, though I'm considerably less keen on the gender stereotyping (and phrasing) of "Females will sometimes freak out at dying family members." 'Females' grieve, men avenge: videogames.

If you own or have been considering buying the game, the full list of The Forest updates is worth browsing. It's still a long way from done, but "super deep ponds" are now fixed.