The Forest
BANGER · Action · 2018
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $19.99.
- Length
- 15.8h
- Value
- $1.27/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT, 5 GB of storage. Windows only.
As the lone survivor of a passenger jet crash, you find yourself in a mysterious forest battling to stay alive against a society of cannibalistic mutants. Build, explore, survive in this terrifying first person survival horror simulator.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.99, set in December 2024. 70 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 50 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 94 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Subnautica ($29.99, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats Sons Of The Forest ($29.99, scores 65).
Critics scored it 83. Players sit 13 points higher at 96 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 12 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2026 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 3,221 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,770 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 84 percent of the 26,537 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 15.8 hours; clearing it takes 59, which is 3.8 times the campaign.
Still 2.9K concurrent players, 8 years in.
The drop-off
84% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
2,892 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I'd rate The Forest a 9/10. I played it with my wife, and it was honestly a lot of fun playing together. The survival mechanics, creepy atmosphere, exploration, and building made every session exciting. Exploring caves and trying to survive the cannibals was even better with someone else. The story was also interesting and kept us wanting to play more. Overall, The Forest is an awesome co-op survival horror game...
okay rt. one of the few games i've finished. Got most of the achievements just to get the achievements lol. So multiplayer I do wish it could be better but the authenticity of it gets ruined by either kids or modders and I do wish language was a choice because you get put into servers with people who dont speak the language. And gameplay is more demanding when people are expecting you to lead the show instead of...
Very fun and interesting game, especially if you are playing it with a few of your favourite people.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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The Forest scores 85/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/242760/the-forestThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.