The Forest 3 Takes Survival Horror to Space: Endnight Games Reveals Alien Planet Setting at Game Awards

The Game Awards 2025 delivered one of the night's most unexpected reveals when Endnight Games unveiled The Forest 3, taking the beloved survival horror franchise in a direction nobody saw coming. Gone are the familiar forests of Earth - this time, players will find themselves stranded on an alien planet millions of astronomical units from home.

From Earth's Forests to the Stars

The reveal trailer opens with what appears to be routine space travel. A lone survivor sits in a spacecraft cockpit, the display showing a comfortable 2.3847 AU to Earth. A chess board sits nearby, oldies music plays on the radio, and the atmosphere suggests a long but manageable journey home.

Then everything changes.

The distance counter begins climbing at an alarming rate - 135 million AU, then 438 million AU - as warning lights flash red and the ship hurtles through what appears to be an uncontrolled hyperspace jump. The craft crashes on an unknown world, its corridors flooding with dark liquid as systems fail one by one.

An Alien World Awaits

When the dust settles, players find themselves on a planet that feels both familiar and utterly foreign. Dead, twisted trees pierce through thick fog, reminiscent of the forests that defined the original games. But the similarities end there.

The landscape is harsh and unwelcoming - volcanic rock formations, strange atmospheric lighting that shifts from cold blue to ominous red, and an ever-present sense that you are very, very far from home. The "forest" of the title takes on new meaning here, describing not Earth's woodlands but the alien growth that covers this distant world.

New Tools for a New World

Surviving on an alien planet requires more than axes and campfires. The trailer showcases an array of sci-fi technology that represents a major evolution for the series. Players wield futuristic pistols with glowing energy cores, clearly designed for threats far more dangerous than the cannibals of the original game.

Perhaps most intriguing is the mechanical claw system that appears throughout the trailer. This crane-like device seems central to gameplay, potentially used for construction, resource gathering, or capturing the alien creatures that now pose the primary threat.

Robotic vehicles dot the alien landscape, suggesting a level of base-building and exploration that dwarfs anything in the previous games. The scope appears massive, with the trailer hinting at vast alien environments waiting to be explored and exploited for survival.

The Horrors of Deep Space

No Forest game would be complete without terrifying creatures, and The Forest 3 delivers in spectacular fashion. The trailer's most striking moment shows a massive alien entity emerging from red fog, its form suggesting something between the mutants of Sons of the Forest and pure cosmic horror.

Smaller tentacled creatures appear earlier in the footage, being dispatched with the new energy weapons. The implication is clear: this planet is alive with hostile life forms, and players will need every technological advantage to survive.

A Bold New Direction

For fans who have followed Endnight Games since The Forest launched in 2018, this represents the studio's most ambitious leap yet. The original game defined a generation of survival horror, dropping players on a cannibal-infested island after a plane crash. Sons of the Forest (2023) expanded the formula with more complex enemies and building systems.

The Forest 3 throws out the rulebook entirely. By moving the setting to space and an alien world, Endnight Games has given themselves creative freedom to reimagine every aspect of the survival experience. New creatures, new technology, new environments - everything is on the table.

The atmospheric horror remains intact, however. That sense of isolation, of being hunted by things you don't understand, permeates every frame of the trailer. If anything, being stranded hundreds of millions of AU from Earth amplifies the terror. There will be no rescue coming.

The reveal has already generated massive buzz across gaming communities. The combination of the franchise's proven survival horror formula with a completely new sci-fi setting has captured imaginations in ways few announcements manage. The Forest 3 proves that sometimes the scariest thing isn't what lurks in the woods - it's being alone on a planet where nothing evolved to be friendly.