Sons of the Forest has hard mode now just in case you hate joy

Now that the title has weeded out those who find excitement in the simple and non-tedious, welcome, fellows who find fun in profoundly challenging survival scenarios.

This year's survival hit, Sons of the Forest, now has a hard survival difficulty, letting you suffer and be miserable in the absolute best way. This is on top of normal changes that tweak game balance and make survival harder: For example, there's the really nice addition that food buff durations last 4 hours in-game, rather than 8, and that medical supplies are now rarer in crates. That, and resting is now modified by how comfortable you are: Nicer clothes and food make rest more productive.

But the big addition is hard mode. I'll let that speak for itself: "Reduced food spawns in crates. No Item storage crate respawn on load in this game mode. Lowered fish and animal spawns. Decreased target health and stamina regen speeds while cold. Increased penalty for raw/rotten meats."

There are also some tweaks and additions to building. You can now make stone buildings, with a stone fireplace, stone walls, stone beams, and stone columns as basic building parts. To aid that the advanced log sled can now hold logs, rocks, stones, sticks, and bones, for greater versatility when gathering resources. Your boy Kelvin can now pick up stones, sticks, and rocks and put them in the sled to boot. Good boy, Kelvin.

You can read the entirety of the Sons of the Forest Update 6 Notes on Steam.

The sequel to cannibal survival sim The Forest is rife with the things you expect: Cannibals and Survival. What you might not have expected if you didn't play the first one is that it's a big hit, selling millions of copies quite quickly. The other thing you should know is that Kelvin is the best sweet baby cinnamon roll boy of all videogames, except if you now hate him because they made him smarter.