Endnight Games announce Forest 3 at The Game Awards – and it’s even weirder than normal

The Game Awards have been rather massive for reveals this year. And while some are gargantuan, we original survival nerds are very happy to see the Forest franchise appearing on our screens out of nowhere. If you’re not aware (and we wouldn’t blame you for not having a clue, given the obscure trailer), Endnight announced Forest 3 at TGA late into the evening.

The trailer for the game showed what appeared to be a spaceman traveling through some sort of stellar wormhole. In the end, it merged into a strange, Earth-like world, but the scriptures are not what we know. There are tall, demonic ladies, weird Lovecraftian things, demon bats, and other little plants that look like they belong in Alien Earth. Our character also has a form of space plasma gun, a new twist in the tale.

But, there were clues that it’s the Forest franchise. We see you in those opening frames, classic Forest cereal box.

At the end of the trailer, it revealed the name, Forest 3. So, it appears to be a sequel to the franchise’s narrative and Sons of the Forest.

There is no release date for the game yet. Hell, even the game itself is not on Steam listings yet. So maybe I’m writing about an AI trailer that isn’t actually real. How very Sons of the Forest coded. Odds are, we’ll be waiting a while in blissful ignorance, similar to how radio-silent Sons of the Forest was until the game was released in Early Access back in February 2023.

I’m a relatively big fan of The Forest franchise, having played the original before I even wrote my first article. Just a warning, I’m about to do some theorycrafting about the trailer via some big spoilers from SOTF, so read on with care! Since I, too, would like to know what’s going on in that fever-dream trailer.

A sequel to Sons of the Forest’s ending?

If you finished Sons of the Forest, you might have seen that mysterious device in the hell cave. Christians interpreted it as demons. But when you get in, it distorts things around it, mutating living things in the process. We also saw some time travel or multiverse string theory at work, which wasn’t entirely explained in the second one. We did see that moon base outside the mysterious cube, so this might be the setting for Forest 3.

The new game may capture that technology found in the hell cave in Sons of the Forest. Whether Earth has gone wrong due to experiment mishaps, or we travel through space and dimension to reach where these monsters came from, remains to be seen. 

The opening frame of the trailer mentions that they are traveling  2.38 AU before reaching Earth. That’s 2.38 times the distance between the sun and Earth for those wondering. Something happens, though, that flings the ship faster than light, before we crash land on what looks to be a very twisted version of the planet, like it’s 1968’s Planet of the Apes opening all over again.

It seems like we are getting Earth as the world map. Though which versions of Earth are we getting? Multiverse Earth; or a greatly mutated earth? We don’t entirely know.

If you’re interested, you can watch the Forest 3 trailer via some random dude’s reupload of the game trailer. Endpoint has not actually released the trailer on their own channel yet. There’s a theme here.

In case you missed it, there were a few other banger announcements from the Game Awards. We particularly enjoyed the Divinity, Total War: Warhammer 40K, and Highguard from former Respawn devs, too.

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