14 DAY TRIAL // Darkwood is yet another game that tries to solve the age-old debate of how to make a proper horror video game without having to resort to cheap jump scares.
Coming from independent developer Acid Wizard Studio, the action-adventure game is currently available on Steam Early Access, alive and kicking in its alpha stage of development.
The game features a dark and mysterious procedurally generated world, and tasks you with surviving in a strange and merciless environment.
To aid you in your effort, you can employ various skills and make use of the game's extensive crafting system in order to create the necessary tools and weapons to get you through the challenging encounters.
You can craft traps and build barricades in order to better defend against the horrors that begin to roam the land when night falls, and you put them all together from an array of simple ingredients, as well as from experimenting with various objects you find.
The setting of Darkwood is an alternate-reality Eastern European forest, and, as you all know, Eastern European forests are pretty scary, especially at night, when the creeps come out to play.
The developers are not exactly forthright regarding what kind of creeps you come up against, as there is a bit of a mystery surrounding the exact circumstances of your existence.
The game combines role-playing, survival and roguelike elements, and thus offers a potentially different experience with every playthrough. The only constant is the slant toward horror, from the general monochromatic appearance of the environment, to you field of vision, the way you cast various types of light around you, and the many weird encounters, that sometimes border on the grotesque.
Exactly what you're trying to do or who you are is not entirely clear and appears to be of secondary concern to the game's creators. Darkwood seems to be content to allow you to explore its world on your own, without worrying about where all the supermarkets and hardware stores went.
It's a top-down shooter that focuses less on shooting and more on exploration, mixing horror elements with surreal cues, aimed primarily at people who want a horror/survival experience and don't find the fact that you don't do push-ups and practice punching the floor before going to sleep concerning.
Not breaking your fists in the first hard object you hit with them would seem like a priority in such a scenario, as would making an improvised dog-handling glove for you arm, to make all the yummy, succulent dogs outside (that conveniently wander around solo) easier to kill.
Next, learning how to skin a dog and cook it would be a pretty important skill, seeing how man's best friend is an abundant resource. Tanning the hides and cleaning the bones could also be useful. And so on and so forth, until getting to our roots, back when there were other hominids vying for the top spot on the evolutionary scale.
If the game's goal is to find a library, peruse the tech section and learn how to make a radio, and then try to contact other people in a similar situation to yours, I'll be genuinely impressed. Likewise, if you practice punching dogs until you become the next Mike Tyson, and start punching ghosts into submission.
Until then, I'm content with pointing out that the game shows some potential, but there is also a lot of room for improvement, in both the complexity of the crafting system as well as in adding more storage options and some interface tweaks.
In addition to this, some visual cues would also be nice on the items you can interact with, especially at a distance, because right now a lot of the environment blends in with the stuff you are able to interact with, and it all gets pretty muddled and inconsistent, with various items that you would be able to pick up in real life being just part of the scenery.
A more interactive world would definitely be a plus, as well as a real, palpable goal, instead of just randomly going around the map until you die. The game does the atmosphere part right, no doubt appealing to fans of the horror genre, relying on the fear of the unknown as its main driving force, as well as on a dark, looming visual style to convey the constant state of tension.
Although it's hard for me to understand the fascination with the horror genre, as at one point in time I did turn 7 and started going to school, learning about the world and reading, and as a consequence of that, I have become immune to the otherwise deadly effects of astrology and ghosts, the game seems to be on the right track so far.
I'm not a big fan of David Lynch either, so please don't put weird stuff in just for the sake of having weird stuff in the game, like he does with his movies. Have them make sense instead, and you'll be much better off.
I look forward to crafting countless rusty nail clubs to spank nightmarish visions with, hoping that there is some reasoning behind the twisted iconography and all the occult mumbo-jumbo in the game.
