![]() The game opens in a desolate, darkened house and provides almost no information to the player. “It’s like a twisted and dark vision of that.” “Traveling to our grandmother and grandfather and those recollections,” he said. While the trio of developers was living in Warsaw while they were making the game, Koc said he grew up in the countryside and much of the setting draws from his experiences living there. We decided to make it Polish to make it as authentic as we could.” “That’s why the setting is Slavic because we are from Poland. “We are really inspired by old sci-fi Russian writers like the Strugatsku brother, who wrote ‘Roadside Picnic,’ which became ‘STALKER and David Lynch movies,” Kuc said. That top-down view, which typically would provide an entire screen of surroundings to see, was narrowed down to a slive, a claustrophobic cone of light and the story became much more into focus. “Darkwood” became a different sort of title. “The top-down view was more about the fact that we were only three guys.”Īs the game grew. “Basically, we were adding more and more mechanics from the games we liked. “We were really inspired by ‘Home Alone’ where you are setting traps, but it expanded a lot from a three-month game to working on it from five and a half years,” Kuc said. This is a game which has a lot to show, but it shouldn’t be quite so dark that the player can’t take it all in.Despite its dark tones, “Darkwood” started out as an idea for a tower defense game with surprising inspiration. Close-quarters combat uses a bunch of stamina, so conservation always has to be at the front of your mind.ĭarkwood is a chilling but at times irritating experience. ![]() Other obstacles to progress include the health and stamina meters, the latter of which recharges at a slow rate or a snail’s pace if you use it all up. With ammo so finite and a ‘honing in’ system which means you have to aim down the sights for a short period of time in order to get a clean shot, guns feel like more hassle than their worth. Grisly sights like this are abound in the forest.Įven guns don’t solve the problem when they appear. It’s an immersion-breaker, which is the worst-case scenario for a horror game – yes, there is the sensation that something might be sneaking up on you unseen, but that feeling is overpowered by the frustration of not being able to see the game. ![]() With the heavy reliance on using resources to craft items including torches, for too often players have to focus on a dimly-lit circle in the centre of the screen and being forced to hunt down new resources without being able to see them, kind of the equivalent of Velma in Scooby-Doo feeling around on the floor for her glasses. The main problem during the exploration is that too much darkness can be a bad thing. ![]() That’s a pretty discombobulating experience, particularly when the progression in the game is largely dependent on getting a good grasp of where everything is. The map doesn’t actually show your location in the woods, only giving you a clue if you’re near a previously-discovered landmark. On the other side of the gameplay, there’s no hand-holding at all with the exploration. Doing deals with travelling merchants forms the core of Darkwood’s upgrade system. There’s nothing quite as chilling as the sound of floorboards creaking or even a door swinging open inside a house that you previously thought was secure, and that’s what Darkwood does best. Safe houses provide the respite from the horrors of the night, but the windows must be adequately secured by boarding up, in order to buy the chance of holding fort through the night. As you perform a 360 swivel, things will appear and disappear from the screen in a quite unnerving visual.įor a lot of the time in Darkwood, the player is on the defensive. Even if things happen in close proximity, you aren’t guaranteed to be able to see them, as things need to be directly in your line of sight to even appear. Much like in any good horror game, a lot of the chills and scares come in the form of twigs snapping, sudden sounds coming out of the forest or other things which happen just out of your sight. Like the majority of survival horrors, the player’s success depends on their interaction with the environment, picking up items to refill their health, weapons to defend themselves and tools to make it into new areas. Anything out of your light path becomes invisible on the screen, meaning anything can creep up on you. That’s what you get in Darkwood, a top-down survival horror first seen on Steam in 2014 and recently making an appearance on a Nintendo system for the first time after being announced in a Nindies Direct in March. Being stuck in a seemingly never-ending forest with hordes of demented and supernatural killers on your tail is never a pleasant-sounding way to spend a night.
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