Forest 3 Revealed at The Game Awards 2025

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The Game Awards 2025 featured some surprising announcements, and one of the biggest was for Forest 3. The trailer revealed a significant change in the game’s story and how it will be played. Host Geoff Keighley called it “completely unexpected,” and viewers agreed – it was a genuinely shocking reveal.

The first game in the series, The Forest, officially launched in 2018 after a lengthy period of early access, and quickly became a hit on PC. Almost six years later, Sons of the Forest followed with an early access release, and achieved a full launch in 2024. Both games have attracted a large player base and consistently received positive reviews on Steam. Now, the developer, Endnight, appears poised to continue the franchise with a third installment, promising a compelling new direction for the story.

Forest 3 Adds Sci-Fi to the Survival Horror Formula

The first trailer for Forest 3, shown at The Game Awards 2025, introduced a surprising science fiction setting. The trailer features a spaceship crashing on Earth, a callback to the beginnings of past Forest games. Emerging from the wreckage, the pilot finds a post-apocalyptic world similar to Death Stranding, overrun with wandering mutants. These creatures seem to be evolved from the mutants in previous games and now dominate the planet, though the exact story timeline isn’t yet known.

The trailer for Forest 3 doesn’t show much of the actual gameplay, likely because the game is still being developed. However, it does hint at a greater variety of enemies, including monstrous, alien creatures. The main character has a robotic arm that seems to help with manipulating objects and uses advanced scanning technology to find and track nearby dangers. While the trailer doesn’t explain why the astronaut is on Earth, it’s possible they’re continuing the search for mysterious ancient artifacts – like the Cube – that are central to the series’ storyline, as seen in previous games.

Image via Endnight Games

There Were Already Signs of a Timeline Shift in the Forest Games

Okay, so the trailer for Forest 3 totally blew my mind with all the sci-fi stuff, but it’s not like it came out of nowhere. If you’ve been following the series, you’ll remember the Sons of the Stars cult and that weird Cube. There’s always been this undercurrent of parallel universes and talk about Gold City – this place that’s supposed to be like heaven for the cult, but also maybe connected to aliens or other realities. And remember in Sons of the Forest when you’re building the Artifact and you find that crashed spaceship? A lot of us fans think that might be a clue about what’s going on in Forest 3 – it feels like everything’s starting to connect!

Image via Endnight Games

A popular fan theory about the upcoming game, Forest 3, suggests the astronaut seen in the trailer is traveling between different dimensions. This idea stems from the ending of Sons of the Forest, where players see a futuristic city with spaceships. Many believe the spacecraft in the Forest 3 trailer is from that dimension and is visiting Earth, perhaps to study it. Another theory proposes that the person in the trailer is actually the creator of the mutants from both The Forest and Sons of the Forest, meaning Forest 3 could be a story set in the past. These are just speculations at this point, and it’s still unclear what the developers, Endnight, will reveal about the game and how long fans will have to wait for more information.

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2025-12-12 16:35