I have a special relationship with Darkwood. In 2023, I had a choice between moving forward with my product design career or abandoning it to learn game development and make something akin to a Darkwood clone: a 2D survival horror with tower defense elements where you played as an engineer trying to escape a dilapidated medieval castle. I chose to keep pushing as a product designer, and it netted me money and experience working on projects I found interesting, but it left a hole I’ve been trying to fill with this blog ever since, and in writing this review, I hope I’ll finally move on and leave it behind.
I hate modernity because for every decision I make, I have to cut out something of myself and leave it on wayside. I abhor the way products are designed to fill the user’s interface with meaningless clutter, and despise how advertising is a motor that runs the majority of the Internet at the expense of good experiences.
Video games seemed, at that time, a functional and inexpensive hobby I could eventually turn into a job. That was, before I delved deeper into Darkwood and thought as hard as I could about my life choices.
Darkwood's development was fraught with sleepless nights and bullshit reviews coming from people who didn’t know any better. Three Polish guys with no experience decided to spend their free time designing a video game. They started with a tower defense where you barricade yourself inside a cottage and fight hoards of evil beings, and the newly founded Acid Wizard studio somehow brainwashed themselves into developing a survival horror title.
Survivor horror is one of the most polarizing video game sub-genres because people think they know what it is, but they don’t. Most indie survivor horror games are “homages” (copies) of the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill 2. Indie devs embed clunky mechanics, janky controls, and a strange approach to combat that leaves people frustrated and unsatisfied, then say “well, that’s the genre.”
And then, there’s Darkwood; a video game that’s forgiving despite its initial impression, and that attempts to give the player character a power curve, going from hillbilly wielding a plank, to John Wick. The power transition feels seamless; in a 20-hour playthrough you go from barely escaping a scrape with a rabid dog to torching down the Great Alien Thing that corrupted the titular “wood”.
And yet, the developers had no idea how to do even the most basic things in the early stages of development. Fueled by sleep paralysis and what I can only assume was Monster drinks, they managed to create the best survival horror in history. Later on, the devs burnt out so hard they’ll likely never ship another game. It’s a great journalistic tale, one that was presented in detail on YouTube channels that aren’t sponsored by World of Tanks or, Wolfman forbid, Skillshare.
It’s a game where the horror comes from your vulnerability against enemies. Combat is one of the most overused mechanics in the industry, and the point of combat-heavy games is to:
In survival horror, the point is to have every type of enemy be capable of killing you, and in the process, impose heavy penalties in the form of lost ammo, or lost resources. Your drive is “I’m afraid of being stomped to death”, not “I want to stomp everyone to death.” Your goal is to survive and preserve the little you have, not to win. Win states in survival horror games are closer to escapes than to royal rumbles, and combat should be costly because resources should be scarce.
Enter the bane of my existence: Resident Evil 4.
Since survival horror are stressful and annoying, someone realized that success lies in combining the two drives I mentioned before, and presented their ideas to the people who developed Resident Evil 4. RE4 is… interesting. It inherits the clunky combat and controls from previous titles but makes an actual show out of combat encounters and devolves into a cover shooter where you fight military men.
I dislike Resident Evil 4, but not because it’s not scary enough, but because it’s a mediocre third-person shooter in a drawn-out campaign, where QTEs are abound and puzzles are an excuse for slowing down the flow of gameplay. Puzzles in Resident Evil and Silent Hill games are a bastardization of item hunts, and in some cases, bullshit, like the chute puzzle in Silent Hill 2. I don’t remember many puzzles in RE4 because I was preoccupied with exploding the monsters, but I remember the escape room in RE7. The developers of RE7 received feedback that the game was “too scary”, so they made RE Village, which I like, but I think nobody in their right mind will claim it’s a survival horror. The point of Village isn’t to survive, it’s to take down the Eldtrich critters that want to roast you alive but that will also take twenty minutes to roast you in a stand-up comedy show each.
I think there’s a bit of grifting in the idea that there’s a difference between “action horror” and “survival horror”. Usually, people will call action horror the games they expected to be survival horror but turned out third or first-person shooters with crafting mechanics.
This bleeds into other franchises. The original Dead Space was a third-person shooter with a horror theme that was unfortunately nicknamed “RE4 in space”, and Dead Space 2 was lambasted for being “action horror” even if it was the same game, set in the same universe, with better controls and combat. It seems the difference comes down to how good it feels to fight. If combat is satisfying, it makes people desire to engage with it. So for survival horror to feel like proper horror, combat should be shit. But the people will further complain the combat is shit, and when developers make it better, it’s an “action horror.”
Darkwood's combat isn’t purposefully bad. You can get better at it if you time your hits correctly and manage your stamina well, and keep a steady supply of repair materials in your hideouts. The idea behind the combat is that you shouldn’t strive to fight, but that fighting is what you have to do to survive. In Darkwood, you’ll have to explore to find resources, maintain your hideouts, plan your trips before the night, engage in dialogue, and craft better gear. Combat is a small part of the experience, but it’s often the most frequent complaint, and I think I know why that happens.
Darkwood has a progression system, where you unlock perks and improve your inventory and weapons. This progression system will last you only for the first part of the game, in the forest. If you play the game well, by the time you reach the second map (the swamp), there will be no more meaningful character progression.
This makes the second map feel drawn out, because the progression doesn’t support another ten hours of content. The combat encounters feel more exhausting because you waste ammo in keeping monsters at bay for reputation rewards that barely cover what you spent the previous night.
Reputation is the game’s currency, and the best way to earn it is by surviving the tower defense sequences in your hideouts. At night, you have to stay in hideouts because night itself is an enemy, and that’s when beasts come out to play. There’s an element of randomization in your encounters, so it’s possible to go by an entire night in your early hideouts and not see any action, but the tension, amplified by the soundscape and the unnerving rustling of the wooden planks beneath your feet will make you puke from stress. It’s an achievement of game design when you create horror out of absolutely nothing. And when the monsters inevitably break through your meager barricades, the game explodes in an adrenaline rush that asks you to keep a steady aim against whatever’s in the corner. You aim, swing, run into your own bear traps, and watch as your character is mauled by the something that screeched so loud you couldn’t even hear yourself think. In the morning, time freezes, and the trader comes to sell you more stuff to survive the coming day.
During the day, your visibility is limited. It’s possible to get whacked in the head by another something that gruffs and puffs like a motherfucker, and in your scaredy-cat sprint, to end up in a trap, or step over poisonous mushrooms.
There’s tedium to the exploration, much like in any other survival games. You have to manage a steady supply of wood and fuel for your generator, because at night, you won’t see a damn thing without lamps. But lamps attract critters, so you’d better block the cracks in windows.
One thing I like about the first map is that you can choose your combat difficulty by picking a particular hideout. Hideouts will make story-relevant runs easier, but if you don’t survive the night, you’ll have to rely on day exploration to find things to sell to the traders. It’s a nice balance, one that unfortunately disappears on the second map, where it’s a single hideout, and the story-runs are longer, and there’s a secret ending you only get a single shot per playthrough at.
It doesn’t get harder mechanically, it’s just more tedium, so the player is incentivized to spend as little time as possible in the swamp, even if it’s better looking than the forest, and the NPCs are more horrific and insane. And, yes, I know you know about the mushroom lady you can feast on, and no, she doesn’t respawn after you gulp her.
The book Roadside Picnic is single-handedly credited for the invention of The Zone, which is a pseudo-radioactive area formed on Earth after Aliens had a picnic, packed, and fucked off back where they came from. Darkwood isn’t The Zone, but the core of the story is an alien being that came form somewhere and nestled in a giant tree, infecting the woods around, walling in the area where it slumbers, and taking the people hostages and putting them to sleep. Your character was a military guy sent into the forest to aid the people trapped. He failed, and the alien infection disfigured him.
Your “story” is taking the protagonist through a series of morally ambiguous actions, which always result in a form of suffering for someone, with the end goal of escaping through a bunker into the swamp, and from the swamp through an opening left through the forest after burning down a large tree. Once you get to “normal” territory, it’s up to you to notice that the NPCs don’t react to your disfigurement. Should you discover cracks in your apartment, they’ll lead to you waking up inside the “real” Alien Tree. From there, you should probably torch it to the ground, dooming your sorry hide in the process, but ridding the world of a roadside picnic gone wrong.
Well, there’s also the sound design, which is always one of the most important aspects of horror. The character portraits are well-drawn, the environments are lush with details and interesting paths despite the procedural generation, and the crafting is a good addition to the game despite the small user interface.
The systems work together to keep you on edge for the entirety of a playthrough. You don’t get breathing moments, certainly not while exploring, so it’s a game designed for a specific type of masochist who enjoys stress simulators. This is what makes Darkwood the best survival horror game: its commitment to keep the player on edge at all times without unnecessary cutscenes, goofy one-liners, shooting galleries, bad boss fights, and padded puzzles.
Video games are a massive industry. Publishers can lauch disasters like Concord, pour bazillions of dollars into it, then watch as it fumbles in an ocean of forgotten games and call it the “cost of doing business” because all you need is a hit. Indie developers follow in those footsteps, building interesting careers out of sequels for titles that should have been better left alone. In doing this, they cannibalize their own ideas and disappear like James' not-girlfriend in the fog of Silent Hill 2. It’s one thing to watch trash like Concord crash and burn, it’s another to watch the people who developed one of your favorite video games of all time take a forever sabbatical. Acid Wizard Studio didn’t just have to contend with the self-imposed crunch and the demands of IndieGoGo backers, but with the requirement of pushing out patches. They had to deal with the expectation of creating something new after their (very) mild success in the indie space. Darkwood wasn’t a hit, not in the way Hollow Knight was, and without a publisher, they couldn’t have kept pushing for long anyway.
The machine grinds even your favorite indie titles to dust, and I suppose we should count ourselves lucky because Darkwood didn’t get an unnecessary sequel. Who am I kidding? Fucking hours after writing the first draft of this review I saw the trailer for Ice Pick Lodge’s Darkwood 2. Here’s hoping it won’t flop into primordial mud.
Because giants like Resident Evil and Silent Hill eat up the majority of survival horror fans to this day, I believe posterity will remember Darkwood as something they think they remember for the torrent launch, but not for all the mechanics that made the game great. In turn, indie devs will keep churning more Resident Evil and Silent Hill clones.
If Darkwood can’t stand out, how can one hope they’ll pick up game development close to their thirties and launch a massive hit? That’s one thing, but even game-related YouTube channels that I like eventually turn to terrible drama channels or overly drawn-out “retrospectives” chockful of plot summaries and don’t forget to like and subscribe and buy some merch!
Gaming is an inexpensive hobby if you do it patiently. I used to think that a few hours a week wasn’t such a big deal, but those hours multiplied until they reached stratospheric levels of hubris. I had a 1000-word rant about how I wasted my life playing Witcher 3 for three times, and I hate that that is a result of gaming as a hobby. The problem is that time is not self-equivalent. The hours spent in Darkwood are not the same hours I spent in Witcher 3, but the demands for having that experience are stupid. The more I game, the more I try to make gaming efficient, because there’s not enough time left anymore, not for gaming, and certainly not for picking up game development to be eventually grounded to powder by the industry. There’s quite a bit of grifting there, too, with the idea that you can just “pick something up” and in only a few (ten) years of crunch you’ll make something worth buying and remembering.
The, there are too many games to play. This is the primary reason why I’m taking a year-long sabbatical from gaming, and this entry is a farewell of sorts. I’ve done a guesstimation and determined that, if you’re serious about gaming as a hobby, it would probably take you around four years of playing full-time each business day to finish most of everything that’s critically acclaimed and easy to find out from YouTubers and Reddit posts. This is an insane amount of time to dedicate to something that’s supposed to be “fun”, but the reality is that only full-time gaming YouTubers and streamers have the bandwidth to play what was interesting from the past, let alone the new releases that demand modifications on your PC.
I was lucky enough to have purchased an Asus laptop that allows me to play a lot of titles, but it’s not powerful enough to run current gen titles like the Silent Hill 2 remake, Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and the critically acclaimed Raytracing Simulator. It’s easy to give into fear of missing out, but my ethos as a patient gamer would prevent me from impulse buys anyway.
At least, that’s what I told myself before I impulse bought Oblivion Remastered, and I welcomed it because I dislike the original Oblivion (we’ll get to that), but it left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, as I’ve spent fifty hours playing a campaign I find boring, in a world that feels empty, on a low resolution because that’s what my laptop could run.
Playing “a few hours a week” is simply not fun. There’s nothing fun about playing Skyrim for an hour a day, and only playing a couple of hours on the weekend will not allow you to learn games that demand a lot of skill. Impulse purchases on discounts replaced full price purchases because current price tags are intimidating to anyone who is not an American.
The average gamer with a normal life with responsibilities has no chance of ever playing everything, so you shouldn’t even bother with wishlists and backlogs because, eventually, finishing the backlog will feel like a chore. It’s much better for everyone to find their specific, niche interests in gaming, then support the developers that put out those games. This is the primary principle behind supporting Early Access titles, in my opinion: only support an Early Access developer that you know about, and that you care for, because it fits within your extremely specific interests.
And a game developer I liked who put out a video game I loved went bust. And my niche interest is cannibalized by people who play Signalis and think it’s not a clone of older, clunkier titles.
I still think we’re in the golden age of video games, but this era is closing in with the insane amount of titles launched yearly. There’s too many people banging on the same doors, and as a customer, I have become so picky that I turn my nose at anything that doesn’t grab me in a couple of hours. Can you imagine having this mentality at ten years of old? Time is closing in, and I feel I have to shed skin after skin so that I could be squeezed in the smallest possible keyhole and emerge on the other side a shell of my former self, who had years and years worth of time for experimentation and playing around.
I know this rant turned into a pretentious treatise about how time and capitalism don’t jive together, but Darkwood is, and always will be, a perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon I’m describing: talented individuals burn out in the effort of squeezing themselves through the keyhole of market expectations.