The sky grows gloomy. You quickly return to my hiding place and start the generator to give me the light you will need to survive the night. You pull a stool behind the front door, set traps near the unbarricaded windows, and then lock yourself in the bedroom with a plank of nail-riddled wood in your hands and your attention locked on the door.
The music begins, something growls in the distance, and tension builds. Your range of vision is being clawed at by darkness, as the bedroom door suddenly creaks open. Your heart is about to explode out of your chest, but you are firmly anchored in place and will not dare to move from the position you are in.
When you believe you are finished, everything goes white, and you realise it is day two. The music gets louder and the lighting changes. Then you realise that it has been around five minutes since your last breath. Darkwood forewarns players that it will not hold their hands when they first start the game. It most certainly does not, either.
Games like Dark Souls served as inspiration for Darkwood, a game focused firmly at the hardcore gaming audience. This implies that while Darkwood may be entirely insurmountable for some players, those who endure through the game’s myriad difficulties will be rewarded.
Into the thick of it we go
Darkwood isn’t your average horror game, with its gore, weaponry, and jump scares. The developer boasts that the game contains no jump scares, relying instead on pure ambiance and psychological terror. In the prelude, you play as an unstable scientist concerned with finding a way out of the titular forest, which is a rather basic but vital tutorial. Darkwood is a cursed location, similar to Silent Hill, that keeps people inside and tortures them with nightmarish monsters and people who aren’t who they seem.
It’s a unique top-down survival horror game with a dash of roguelike and survivor mechanics thrown in the mix. Players aren’t hampered by hunger gauges or anything like that in this survival game, so there’s less micromanagement and more time to engage yourself in the game world.
Darkwood begins with a lengthy introduction sequence that places the player in the shoes of the “Doctor,” a character who will later play a pivotal part in the plot. We learn that a mysterious sickness is ravaging the woodland. Trees are growing at an unnaturally quick rate, obstructing all access to the outside world. The good Doctor has also failed to keep the Hippocratic Oath.
Soon after, he finds himself in a clearing, where he meets a wounded man who has a key that the Doctor believes will lead him out of the woods. The scarred silent guy is subsequently kidnapped and mercilessly assaulted by the Doctor, who is hell-bent on discovering where the key unlocks the door. Then the viewpoint shifts. The player assumes control of the captive individual, who is simply referred to as “The Protagonist” or “Stranger” and is the true protagonist of the game.
The player escapes, the doctor vanishes, and the Stranger is nearly slain by a horde of monsters swarming the Doctor’s home. However, he is rescued by a strange man known only as the “Trader,” and he awakens at the first hideout. This is where the real action starts. The introduction is brief and merely establishes a basic premise: we know very nothing about the Stranger, the Doctor, or the Trader.
Darkwood’s story is obscure and deep, relying heavily on the player’s ability to deduce plot details from the environment, as well as subtle clues and indications offered in the dialogues – or rather, monologues, as the Stranger is unable to speak for unknown reasons. The woods are full of fascinating and unusual personalities, each of whom is bizarre and unpleasant in their own way.
The player will meet the “Trader,” who is likewise mute and has fungi sprouting all over his body, as well as the terrifying and nasty “Wolfman,” and a slew of other characters early on. They’re all shown up close in chat screens, with stunning, sparingly colored imagery that portrays the game’s world’s dark and sad pessimism.
The game’s strongest feature is its world. Players are mostly left to their own ways and charged with exploring a dark, oppressive forest teeming with all manner of terrifying creatures. Surprisingly, it isn’t the deadly creatures and merciless monsters that make Darkwood so terrifying. Darkwood is eerie because of unexpected encounters like a “ghost wedding” or a creepy wolf-man NPC.
It generates a scary atmosphere that will make even experienced horror game gamers flinch. Even merely waiting for morning in the hideout can be terrifying, as there is always the risk of someone or anything breaking in and wreaking devastation on the player. The game’s narrative is largely dictated by the existence of a “day”/night cycle.
During the day, players are urged to search the woods for supplies such as boards to barricade windows or critical things to advance the story, but at night, they must hunker down in their hiding. Players should be safe till morning if they have a completely fueled generator and have adequately fortified their refuge. Players who do not ready for the night will almost certainly be killed by the odd beings who arrive as the sun sets.
Running back to the shelter as night falls can provide some genuinely thrilling moments in Darkwood, but once players are safe, the nights can be rather boring. Later in the game, players may have enough to do in terms of cooking and crafting to keep them occupied at night, but the first few hours will be mostly spent waiting for the next day to arrive. As one might expect, this can be tedious at times.
Darkwood excels at making the gamer feel helpless. The Stranger, the protagonist, has a limited field of view, and visibility is poor in many areas of the map, even during the day. In the gloomy recesses and dense thickets that make up the majority of Darkwood’s locales, players must rely on their ears to discover invisible enemies. Furthermore, the Stranger’s health and stamina reserves are both restricted.
When it comes to health and stamina management, there is only so much room for mistakes, and the game mimics Dark Souls in this aspect. The majority of foes may deplete your health in a couple seconds. If you don’t precisely aim and time your counterattacks, you’ll quickly run out of energy and be unable to fight back or flee. Throughout the game, the player will be able to obtain a variety of weaponry.
These include melee weapons, throwing weapons, and firearms, all of which become more plentiful as the game progresses. In addition, the player can disable and injure foes by using various traps and ambient materials such as gas tanks and exploding cylinders. The moveset, on the other hand, is somewhat limited. It has two attacks: a sluggish one with a wind-up that does more damage while using less stamina, and a fast one that does less damage while using more stamina.
The lone defensive maneuver, on the other hand, is a short-range backward dodge, which requires some ability to use effectively in fight against foes with a larger reach. Overall, we think Darkwood’s combat system works fairly well, though it is a little cumbersome at times and might benefit from some additional weaponry for variety’s sake. A hideout, while it may be the safest location to be in complete darkness, is far from safe.
Adversaries will try to break into the hideout almost every night, and it’s up to the player to strategically barricade entry and exit points, leaving exit points available while herding enemies into locations where they’ll be simpler to trap or battle. Naturally, the safe houses get more harder to defend as time goes on, and the player will face foes who are not only more powerful, but also more numerous. Furthermore, various unexpected events can occur at night, ranging from benign and not-so-benign poltergeists to earthquakes and a variety of unexplainable events that can be beneficial or detrimental.
Finding one of the different NPCs around the procedurally created world, or surviving it through a night in your shelter, is the trading system. If you live, the visiting trader will give you a gift that you may use to buy things — if you die, you’ll get nothing.
On normal difficulties, you must exchange all of your stuff to raise all of your funds. Even commerce necessitates difficult judgments because different sellers offer a variety of items, and practically everything has a purpose. As a result, you must choose between sprinkling your resources broadly over a variety of tactics or specializing at the risk of being under-equipped for specific threats. Even on regular difficulty, this creates headaches, therefore, it’ll be a nightmare on higher difficulty settings.
The ambiance isn’t solely due to the sound direction and general darkness; Darkwood’s visual aesthetic plays a role in all of this. It has precise, 2D characters (with pixel graphics that give it a realistic aspect) and semi-3D environments, with buildings and trees stretching out towards the player, as it is played from a top-down perspective. The treetops would be popping out of the screen at you if this was still the period of 3D glasses.
As you move around the game world, a cone of vision splays out from your character in the direction you’re facing (it’s essentially a twin-stick setup, so you can move in one direction while facing the other), and any interactable objects and living organisms, friendly or not, will only be visible when that cone is upon them. So, if you’re being pursued by something, you won’t be able to see them; you’ll only be able to hear them. Isn’t that a depressing thought? Let me tell you, it’s even worse when it’s happening to you.
As a result, nights are never dull and are one of the game’s high points. The world is open and waiting to be discovered, while some regions may be restricted for plot purposes or until certain conditions are met. The map is procedurally created to some extent, but all significant sites are nearly identical from playthrough to playthrough. Darkwood is heavily reliant on exploration.
There are numerous secrets hidden in the world: you can find supplies, weapons, and side missions that can lead to valuable rewards. However, not every rock are worth turning over, and not every story has a happy ending. Just remember to keep an eye on the clock! If you don’t discover or buy a watch, you’ll have to keep an eye on the environment to figure out when the sun begins to set, since you don’t want to be stuck far from your hiding place once night arrives.
Some parts of Darkwood, on the other hand, point to the fleeting nature of life in the woods. You have the option to euthanize your wounded dog, who sits outside your house wailing in anguish, at the start of the game. If you don’t, the dog will turn into a violent beast when you return, scratching and chewing at you ferociously in a crazy state of mindless violence.
The narrative of Darkwood is unclear at best, and it largely revolves around deciding which NPCs to favor in various subplots, but minor details like this dog’s destiny tell unsettling tales of their own. As a result, certain subplots only describe a portion of the story. Other information are carefully woven into the environment, and these narrative manifestations, as well as the more obvious plot points, are equally important in comprehending the world at large.
Darkwood’s main focus, as already stated, is on its universe and generating a scary mood. The strange tale in the game adds to the creepiness. However, we believe that some people may find it absurd. It’s not surprising that the game’s creators cite David Lynch (the man behind Eraserhead and Twin Peaks) as an inspiration.
We won’t go into detail since we want players to experience the story for themselves, but the game’s gruesome images can be interpreted in a variety of ways. And, given the game’s many endings and the way player decision affects the characters’ destinies, it’s probable that people may leave Darkwood with differing perspectives on what happened during the game’s events.
Darkwood is a title with infinite complexity that will keep horror aficionados enthralled until the very end, thanks to its many shocks. You will be intrigued and anxious for answers, thanks to a strong emphasis on narrative-driven gaming. Creepy audio and a terrifying aesthetic toy with our instincts and terrify the senses. You will probably roll your eyes at the title’s claim of “a horror game without jump-scares.”
Most games employ some form of jump-scare to elicit a quick reaction from players. Even well-executed jump scares to make you feel cheap since you may not be genuinely “scared,” but rather astonished. Where many other games have failed, Darkwood succeeds. It’s an adrenaline rush that any horror lover worth their salt should try to endure.