About This Game

Day 4. The tins are gone. Nobody's coming.

Something came to the islands. The news said lock your doors and wait for help. You waited three days. Help is apparently stuck in traffic.

Dark Forest is a first-person survival game. By day you scavenge, craft, build, hunt and fish. At night things come out of the dark, and they don't care how well you built that shed. Play alone, with up to five Steam friends, or on a server of your own.

A world with no end (and no way back)

• An endless world made as you walk, Minecraft-style: seas, islands, towns, airports and boss islets in every direction. Prefer a cage? Pick a classic archipelago of a fixed size.
  
• Tune it before you start: island size and ruggedness, forests, rivers, lakes, caves, towns, abandoned cars, animals, supplies, seasons, bosses.
  
• Cities, temples, snowy peaks, waterfalls, bridges, fog, thunderstorms and rainbows. Pretty. Deadly. Mostly deadly.
  
• Deer, foxes, wolves, black bears, hares, raccoons and badgers in the woods; crows on the roads; gulls and eagles overhead; dolphins, seals and great white sharks in the sea. Exactly one of these is on your side. It's the dolphins.

Loot it. Make it. Live in it.

• Raid houses, malls, cars and supply boxes. Chop, dig, quarry, and mine iron, copper and coal.
  
• Furnaces, metal tools, bows, guns and ammo. Wire up generators, lamps and a radio that still plays classical.
  
• Build anything: houses, boats, cars, planes. Or just take the cars left in town. Nobody's complaining.
  
• Geometric solids in six materials, from a quarter of a metre to ten metres. Yes, you can build a pyramid. No, it won't save you.
  
• Maps you draw or find, held in your hands, filling in as you walk.
  
• Track, hunt, butcher, cook. Fish for 15 species scanned from real fish: read the float, set the drag, fight it to the end.

Something comes out at night

• Creatures twisted out of human bodies crawl out of the dark. The richer the place — towns, underground — the more kinds of them.
  
• Seven bosses napping on islets built for them, and the Mother at the bottom of a deep mine. Wake them at your own risk. Die and you get up and go again; win and you carve the loot out yourself.
  
• Some airports are burnt-out graveyards. At others an airliner is still waiting for a pilot. Qualifications optional.
  
• Four difficulties, from Casual (no monsters, just you against hunger) to Survival (good luck).

Go underground

• Stalactite caves, flooded caves and old mines, joined by an underground river that runs to the sea.
  
• A cavern with an upside-down mountain, glow-worms like a starry sky and a twenty-metre waterfall into a pit.
  
• A lava abyss, and a 300-metre mine down to the Mother's nest. She's been expecting you.

Friends, or what's left of them

• Online co-op for up to six in the host's world, with voice and text chat. Friendly fire is on. Friendships may not survive.
  
• Your own dedicated server, Minecraft-style, with a downloadable launcher: player limit, difficulty, god mode, whitelist and every other rule in server.properties.
  
• God mode: fly, build for free, drag anything through anything, drop any creature into the world, make them fight, pick them up, tweak their stats. Being god is mostly admin.
  
• Webcam motion capture: your face, your arms or your whole body move your survivor. Punch to strike, flick to cast, dance to embarrass yourself in front of friends. Third person with switchable camera angles, so you can watch.
  
• Your body stays where you fell, with everything you carried. Go back for it. Bring friends. Or don't.
  
• A hand-written notebook, a character creator, a bestiary that outlives you, and dances from real motion capture.
  
• 14 interface languages.

Credits

The animal 3D models are by AnimalMesh 3D, Rukh3D, kenchoo, , popcornbag, igor-lir, n-, Julian Johnson-Mortimer, ucdavisterc and Alexei Ostapenko, used under CC BY 4.0 and modified for the game. Full credits are in the legal notice at the bottom of this page and on the in-game Credits page.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

AI was used to assist in the creation of this game, specifically in the areas of art and coding.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Dark Forest is a survival horror game. You fight and kill mutated, human-like monsters and wild animals with melee weapons, bows and firearms, with red blood and blood stains. Human corpses and bloody remains lie around the world; you can drag and cut up human corpses for materials and butcher animals for meat and hide. The site of an airliner crash shows burnt and dismembered bodies and severed limbs. Some monsters are seen feeding on human corpses, and a parasite bursts out of dead animals. Some of the mutated monsters are naked human forms (no genitals are shown). There is no sexual content. Optional card and dice games let players bet in-game items only (no real money). The game deals with a deadly outbreak, isolation and death.