You won’t be defenseless in your tense travels through Darkwood‘s oppressive forests and shadowy structures. But being able to defend yourself doesn’t equal safety. With meager supplies, slipping sanity, and improvised weaponry, Darkwood pits you against dread-inducing nighttime, otherworldly horrors, and surreal atmosphere as you explore its isolated setting and meet its otherworldly inhabitants.
After an unsettling prologue, you’re let loose in an woodlands cut off from the world, where night brings lurking terrors waiting to tear you apart. During the day, you must explore and scavenge, collecting items to craft useful tools such as bear traps, planks with nails, and bandages, and doing missions for the weird and twisted characters that live here. Barricade the doors and windows of your hideout, keep your generator full with gas, prepare syringes that upgrade your character with both positive and negative perks. And then wait till nightfall, where the real dangers come out.
Rattling breaths and footsteps in the unseen darkness, doors creaking open, horrible things screeching outside…the excellent sound design and overwhelming danger makes every night full of dread and tension, especially when your defenses fail, the lights go out, and monsters breach your shelter. But Darkwood is more than just the cycle of daytime scavenging and nighttime survival. While the map layout is randomly generated, specific locations and scripted events are not, so you have a consistent narrative, random hand-crafted events to react to, choices to make, NPCs to talk with and quests to complete.
Darkwood can be purchased for $ 14.99 on Steam and GOG; you can learn more about developer Acid Wizard Studio through their site, Twitter, and Facebook.
