‘Forest Reigns’ Could Be 2025’s Most Original And Intriguing FPS

It’s been a busy week — thanks, Nintendo — but it quietly revealed a delightfully original first-person shooter you need to keep on your radar. Forest Reigns, a post-apocalyptic tale set in the heart of a devastated yet floral Paris, could be a game that unlocks more potential for an FPS genre that’s crying out for new directions.

Forest Reigns is the brainchild of VG Entertainment, the Ukrainian studio whose members were behind the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Survarium, and Fear the Wolves. Its ambitious FPS aims to merge exploration, survival, and tip-top gunplay, and the trailer alone is enough to get the blood pumping, in ways reminiscent of the gloriously insane samurai dinosaur experience Kyoryu, and Vault 22 in Fallout: New Vegas.

By VG’s own admission, Forest Reigns is a return to its roots. After years of focusing on multiplayer experiences, the studio decided to jump back into single-player experiences with a game that combines exploration, survival, and storytelling — hopefully, one that’s a little more forgiving than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, even if it was my favorite triple-A of 2024 alongside the unfairly maligned Star Wars Outlaws.

Set five years after a catastrophic pandemic wipes out a vast swathe of humanity, Forest Reigns puts players in a reimagined Paris, now overtaken by a sentient forest, to the point the Eiffel Tower looks like a budget version of the Tree of Life from Animal Kingdom. This dangerous foliage can be used both to your advantage and against you in decision-heavy combat. It largely follows the lyrics of the seminal Talking Heads song “[Nothing But] Flowers”, if the protagonist was heavily armed.

As with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., there’s a real focus on the gunplay — Forest Reigns promises realistic weapon handling, with opportunities for players to customize and upgrade their arsenal in a way that caters to different playstyles, even if stealth seems like the obvious key to success in its odd world. Survival and crafting are also massive parts of the experience, underpinned by resource scarcity.

The game also features a non-linear narrative, giving you missions for four distinct factions — not unlike Outlaws —and each one has its own vision for humanity’s future, ultimately deciding on the story’s fate, meaning there’s probably a decent chance there’s plenty of replayability.

So many questions remain, but VG is keeping its cards close to its chest. Done right, Forest Reigns could be a serious contender, but there’s a good chance we won’t see it in 2025. If S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 taught us anything, it’s that patience is a virtue; no one wants a game that only works with a day-one fix that solves 1,125 issues (and then, well, still doesn’t properly work). Forest Reigns clearly has a long way to go to get it up to scratch, but it could be one of the most unique FPS games on our radar right now.

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