Sons of the Forest’s Kelvin is my beautiful son and I will protect him

polygon.com:

Between the lurking cannibals, crashed helicopters, and grisly corpses littered around the island I crash-landed on, I’m not having a very good time. Sons of the Forest is a very scary open world survival experience. I’m forced to sleep under a tarp until I can build my own log cabin by hand, and I’m eating raw fish and scavenged cereal to survive. There’s just one salve to this terrible experience: my good son, Kelvin, who is trying his absolute best.

Sons of the Forest opens with a dramatic sequence. I’m part of a military squad sent to investigate the fate of a missing family of billionaires. However, our copter is shot down, and the pilot and my companion Fisheye are mulched in the ensuing crash. Kelvin and I are the only survivors, and Kelvin has clearly been injured in some serious way. There’s blood leaking out of his ears, and there’s a glassy look to his eyes.

destroys your base<a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/sonsoftheforest?src=hash&ref_src=» https:>#sonsoftheforest

<a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kelvin?src=hash&ref_src=» https:>#Kelvin pic.twitter.com/zyQPJZoFYm

Kelvin trails after the player everywhere they go, and to many fans, he’s a beloved companion. Players have started to call him Kevin out of fondness, and he does his best to keep up with the protagonist. The player can control him — to an extent — with a notepad and paper by giving him tasks to complete. The animations for this are fairly comical. The protagonist writes down a simple command, like “Go get fish and drop them here,” and then hands it off to Kevin — or thrusts it into his chest like an exasperated older sibling with a little brother. Kevin gormlessly grins, nods, and lopes off to go cut down trees or find rocks.

Kevin