All I really know is that I am trying to get out. It's a world where questions lead to more questions. Last night, during a tense wait for sunrise, there was a knock at the door, and someone left a children's party invite for me. Nor do I know why there's a literal wolfman I can talk to, or why a bizarre-looking trader person is in my shelter every morning. I know I'm back in a house like the one I was captured in, but I don't know why I keep returning here whenever I die. I don't mean to sound cryptic in the way I'm writing this, it's just that this is how Darkwood makes me feel. Except, actually, it's only just beginning.
And you begin to see what those cages were for. Then, the game flips and suddenly, you're the stranger and you're locked up, and you begin to see the man you were before in a whole new light. Then a stranger arrives and you capture him. You're some bloke trapped in a cabin in the woods, and as you explore the cabin, you find cages, but you can't clearly see what's going on because the lights are dim - the game loves playing around with light. Keep the lights on, keep the enemies away at night.ĭarkwood makes much more sense in motion - screenshots can't really do it justice.īut it's what's underneath, and what starts to emerge in time, that makes Darkwood so much more. You've played this kind of game a million times before. It's surprising because the top-down, retro presentation - it's quite like Hotline Miami but without the lurid colours - and the base-defence set-up make it feel quite simple. But because reducing Darkwood to a conversation about scares misses so much of what I think it's about.ĭarkwood is deep - surprisingly so.
Not because Darkwood isn't scary, or because it uses jump scares - it has surprised me a few times (maybe there's no getting away from this in horror), though not enough to suggest it leans on this as a scare tactic. Availability: Released 2017 on PC, and 28th October 2022 on PS5īut now I feel misled.Developer: Acid Wizard Games / Crunching Koalas (PS5).It also happened to be Halloween so I wanted to be scared, and Darkwood had just arrived on PS5, so the um, pumpkins aligned. I was drawn to it by the promise of no jump scares - I wondered whether a horror game really could resist the urge to suddenly surprise me, and if it couldn't, how it could scare me. Darkwood is a lot stranger than I expected.
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