Hey now everybody, hope you're all doing well and welcome to my review of Darkwood! While searching for something new to play I recently stumbled upon this game and decided to give it a go. I'm a huge fan of the survival horror genre, so I was a little surprised that I hadn't heard anything about Darkwood before. Apparently the game has been available for PC since back in 2014, but it was only in early access and wasn't fully completed yet. After dealing with numerous issues and fixing a bunch of bugs over the years the developers felt like they had worked out all the kinks, officially launching this onto all major consoles. It looked like a really strange take on the genre with an interesting art style and I've been excited to finally get my hands on it. So let's get started and take a walk through the woods.
Darkwood is a top-down survival horror game developed by Acid Wizard Studio. It's a very mysterious experience, giving the player little to no information about what is going on, who you are, or what you're supposed to be doing at any given moment. All you can do is explore the environment you find yourself in, search for clues and resources, talk with the various characters you might come across and try to stay alive. This isn't the kind of game that holds your hand, giving you a mission marker that tells you exactly where to go. You're meant to choose your own path, make your own decisions and experiment with the combat and survival mechanics.
As the game begins you realize you're in an overgrown forest somewhere in Eastern Europe during the late 1980's. You're trapped in here with many other people and there's no way out. Meanwhile, a strange plague is spreading through the woods wreaking havoc on the survivors. Most of the people you come across during your journey are either mindless and aggressive, or have transformed into something not quite human anymore. This makes the forest a very dangerous place, with deadly creatures everywhere just waiting for you to come walking through. Even the characters that you interact with seem a little off, like they're hiding their true intentions from you until they get what they want.
You play as The Stranger, an outsider who finds himself stuck in this forest with all these crazy people. During the short prologue sequence your character gets held hostage by a deranged doctor. He steals a key you had in your possession that supposedly opens a door leading out of the forest. You manage to break out of the doctor's house and now your mission to track him down and get your key back begins. The first friendly character you come across is the Wolfman, basically a werewolf wearing a hooded jacket, who tells you he knows where the doctor is hiding, but he wants you to do him a favor first. This leads you down a dark and twisted path that slowly unfolds throughout the game and I don't want to spoil anything so I'll stop right there.
The different environments you get to explore all have an excellent atmosphere and a very creepy, unique art style that helps set the tone for the entire game. Your vision is limited due to the top down perspective and your narrow field of view, adding to the overall tension. There is a day to night cycle, but even in the daytime it's still very dark. At night it's pretty much pitch black and not a good idea to stay outside. In fact, that's one of the game's main mechanics that I'll get into in a minute. They do give you a map that gets filled in as you explore, but it doesn't show you where you are. Instead, you need to find your way around by being observant, using various landmarks and getting familiar with you surroundings.
The overall goal you're trying to achieve is finding a way out of the forest, but in order to do that you need to scavenge for supplies, craft weapons and items and complete certain story missions. You have a house that acts as your base of operations that has a workbench for crafting and a place for leveling up your character. During the daylight hours you're able to explore the environment for materials and supplies, but at night you need to retreat back to the house and try to survive until morning. The night brings out much deadlier enemies that will stop at nothing to hunt you down. One of the first things you should do is board up all the windows and doors, set out some traps, fill the generator with gas so you have lights and pick a room to barricade yourself in.
There's a pretty deep crafting system that is really easy to use. Just gather the right materials and you can make everything you'll need to stay alive such as, different melee weapons, guns, traps, light sources and healing items. If you get killed, which will probably happen a lot, you drop half of the items you had on you and spawn back at your base. You can retrieve those lost items by returning back to where you died, so the penalty for death isn't that bad, especially if you're already in your base when it happens. If you collect enough of a certain item you can level up as well, but the perks you get for this are pretty inconsequential and wasn't nearly as important as the crafting.
During the day you need to be exploring as much as possible, but there are still a lot of enemies about. Combat can be a little clunky with the top down perspective and might take a minute to get used to. For a good chunk of the game you wont have access to any guns yet, so you make due with melee weapons. There's a strong attack and a weak attack, as well as a dodge, that all use up some stamina. Managing your stamina is important for fighting and for running around. Weapons can break and need to be repaired, but can also be upgraded in various ways. Eventually you'll have a handful of different guns to use that will make enemies much easier to deal with.
I had a great time with this game, but it wasn't perfect by any means. The day to night cycle, where you have to hide in the house at night, was fun and interesting at first, then by the end it started to become tedious. Your character isn't very tough and I died a lot until I got used to the combat. Also, sometimes your instructions were a little too vague, resulting in me getting lost and stuck a few times.
Playing this game was a unique experience for me and I'm glad I decided to try it. The developers did a great job of creating an excellent atmosphere, with a beautifully creepy art style. Feeling so lost and vulnerable in this strange forest gives you a constant sense of dread and tension that freaks you out without the use of jump scares. There's a lot of interesting places to explore, memorable characters to meet, a wide variety of things to craft and a bizarrely compelling story to discover that can play out differently depending on the choices you make. Since the game only costs $15 I would definitely recommend this to any fan of the survival horror genre. I'm going to give Darkwood a grade of................................
B -
Thank you for reading my review of Darkwood, I hope you enjoyed it!
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