Darkwood Is A Horror Love Letter To Futility
When I bought Darkwood in early October, I didn’t really know anything about it. Hell, I didn’t even know it was a top-down game or that it graphically looked like a JRPG from the 90s. All I knew was that it looked really menacing and was apparently scary as fuck without being scary at all. That sentence doesn’t make much sense right now, but it will soon.
Darkwood has a reputation as “a horror game with no jumpscares”, which is truly impressive considering how MOST horror games rely almost exclusively on jumpscares. Now, at some point it’s like “duh, you can’t have jump-scares in a top-down game”, which is sort of true. But the question would then be “How is it scary?” Well, it’s scary because of literally everything. The writing, the soundtrack, the world design, the structure, the pacing….literally everything in this game works against any sense of comfort or warmth. It isn’t just a scary game, it’s fucking evil. It’s cruel, unforgiving, sadistic and brutally depressing.
01. THE GAME
So what do you do in Darkwood?
Well, you have two goals- survive and get the hell out of here. Survival obviously comes first, but you do need to spend a dedicated chunk of time trying to get out. Because this game actually gets harder in some ways the longer you play it.
Darkwood uses a day and night system. The days are dangerous, but nothing compared to the night. During the day, you collect resources that will allow you to survive the night and follow quest lines that will hopefully, maybe, allow you to escape this forest.
The daytime is when you have to get shit done. You have to go explore and gather shit that will increase your chances of surviving. Careful exploration combined with friendly curiosity about local characters can give you a huge leg up in trying to accomplish your goals. You have a map of the areas. Annoying, you can only see your position if you’re at landmark. So you better find a lot of landmarks to be able to successfully navigate this place. Oh, by the way, this game is sort of randomly generated, so, with some exceptions, every thing is a little different in each playthrough.
During the night, you have to survive. No sleeping in this game. Gasoline is a necessity because you have to fuel generators to keep the lights on because if it gets dark, you’re pretty much dead. You stay up all night, huddled in a corner or roaming around ready to kill intruders. It’s your choice, as much of one as you’ll have. The local denizens of the Darkwood are gonna come at you every night, different ones too. There’s these fun things called “Night Events”, which introduce enemies, subplots and gameplay concepts, often in terrifying fashion. You might see a flare outside and notice someone is watching you through your window. You might hear some loud knocks and find an invitation to some place on the map on your doorstep. Something horrible might appear in your hideout and ruin your evening. It’s a smorgasboard of terror.
How do you defend yourself? You have to craft and use every resource at your advantage. Metal can be turned into bear traps. Old parts can be fashioned into firearms and melee weapons. Wood can be used to fortify your hideout. Glass, gas, rags and alcohol let you make molotov cocktails, which are actually a must. Merchants sell you bullets and crucial components for making weapons or upgrading your inventory. Things like shovels, table legs, pitchforks and homemade shotguns are all part of arsenal of desperation. In general, all of this is much more convoluted and complex than it even sounds and you have to make hard choices EVERY FUCKING DAY. It sucks and it’s brilliant.
But surely you sort of master this after a while right? The difficulty curve must ease up. Fuck you, it doesn’t. This is Darkwood. To progress, you have to go to new zones in the forest and each zone has it’s own hideout, with each one being shittier, larger and progressively harder to defend. You’ll be reminiscing of the first hideout, which at least has most of it’s walls. Now, you can mitigate some of this by traveling back to other zones with easier nights but that cuts a large chunk out of your functional day. You’re basically trading extra nights for easier nights and there’s no guarantee what each night will hold.
At first, I was hiding in the corner for the entirety of the night, using obstacles to create a chokepoint where maybe I could win a DPS race or two every night. As the game gets harder, this strategy becomes more expensive AND less viable. By the end I was standing way outside my base (because I read about the spawn points and basically as long as you stand a certain distance away the majority of the monsters will actually look for you in your house while leaving you completely undisturbed, but that really only works later and in some hideouts they’ll still find you) and putting more distance between myself and danger. Of course, this is risky because if you aren’t within a certain range of your hideout, the floor will kill. Yes. The floor. The floor will kill you if you try and weasel your way out of too many conflicts, unless you weasel intelligently.
Gee, Sebastian, this all sounds really dreadful and hard. It is. This is one of the most difficult video games I have ever played. The movement is intentionally shit. You have very little stamina, so traversal takes forever and most actions have a windup that places a milli-second decision between dealing damage and taking it. Your melee weapons wear down, and sometimes your best course of action is to run. In fact, you actually can get way more done in this game by running than fighting. You can’t just engage with enemies tactically, if you’re smart, engaging at all is a tactical decision. Their are enemies that you are, by design, not really able to matchup with. It all contributes to a looming and oppressive sense of hopeless and fear that I won’t have to run for my life after turning this corner.
And it’s not that you don’t improve in competence. You definitely do throughout the game but it sort of pales in comparison to the brutality this game throws at you later on. It’s perfectly balanced to where you’re barely equipped for what’s happening at all times and some choices in some questlines can actually make the game even harder. One particular choice will have you get robbed late in the game, forcing you to re-gather tons of resources. Another choice will cause a hostile faction to follow you through the game.
Following this philosophy is the upgrade system. There’s a thing called “Essence”, which. you acquire by cooking/melting down food items. Meltdown enough and you pass a threshold and it allows you to level up- but only after you go through a weird dream sequence event that has ramifications in the game world. And these are all different and most of them are really hard and they aren’t repeatable and fucking them up makes the game harder. And there’s no indication which choices cause what. So, you might think you did good avoiding a tough enemy in a dream sequence and find out that it caused like ten of those enemies to spawn in the real world. You might close a door to a location that you need to access. But, that works both ways. Sometimes you can open a door and skip portions of the game. It’s a challenge, but once you become used to the fact you’re completely fucked, it actually becomes an opportunity.
So, after completing these dream sequences, you get to pick a perk. But not just one! Two. A positive perk, like running for 30 seconds without losing stamina, or being able to see everything in the area more clearly, and a negative perk, like being short of breath or weaker to poison. There’s no clear cut advantage here and you’re forced to make compromises based on how you want to play. You can only use each positive perk once a day, while negative perks are passive and constant. But, these are choices. being able to run for 30 seconds to avoid danger might be worth having to be mindful of your stamina bar for the rest of the day. Darkwood puts a lot on your plate and you can never expect it not to.
02. THE STORY OF DARKWOOD
So, before we even get into gameplay or themes or general mythology, what is Darkwood about?
Well, like most stories, at the point you interact with it, it’s about an individual in an unfamiliar and dangerous place. But let’s zoom out! Here is a reasonably concise description:
Darkwood is about a forest in Poland that began mysteriously expanding at rapid speeds in the late 70s. Alongside the expansion, disease and mutation spread to the local population within the forest. Now, in the late 80s when this game occurs, the forest has choked up the and out. Some of the locals were able to leave, but others remain behind, trapped as the result of a government quarantine. The plague (known only as that) causes people to mutate, go insane, or/and eventually just to go to sleep and never wake up. The plague has a really high infection rate and if you’re in the forest, you probably have it, which actually alters the forest itself.
Great. There’s our context. But let’s zoom in now. Who are we in this wonderful, horrible game?
You are not from here, even if you’ve been here many times. A doctor found you and brought you to a house, where you woke up, killed a crazy person locked in the other room and then were knocked out by something you didn’t see, because it attacked in complete darkness. Now, you’ve woken up in yet another house, one you’ve evidently been in for longer than you actually remember because you’ve already set some stuff up, like a pot of some substance on the stove that, according to you “protects you.” Oh and there’s a picture of a road in your pocket.
So, you’re just sort of a guy in this specific set of circumstances. No name, no real backstory. The main thing that is stressed to you, BY YOU, is that you need to get the hell out of here. Luckily, due to information the character has, you have a plan.
Now, about that information- you, the player, do not have it. The person you are playing as does. This is one of Darkwood’s most interesting narrative techniques and one that only really works in a video game. You, the player controlling the character, are acting on information that you possess but since the character “knows" it, you never relay it to the player fully. There’s no “this is this and X and Y” and so on, you just go to a tunnel that you have a key to because…you do.
It’s brilliant and also very uneasy and disorienting. The fact my character knows more than me was something I found very frustrating (in a good way) because I was scared and unfamiliar. As I should be. It creates a weird sense of meta-conflict where my aims and the character’s are not fully aligned. I’m trying to progress in the game by ensuring my character’s survival and my character is withholding information that would help me help them. That sucks and is a completely unique experience in a video game or any media I have ever consumed. It’s also a genius idea.
The Trader.
03. THE CHARACTERS
Thnakfully, we’re not alone. Darkwood has a full cast of colorful and quirky characters that provide a sense of some camaraderie during this journey. These characters provide you with access to key quests that advance and color the story in ways both big and small and it results in a world that feels painfully lived in. Here’s a brief overview of some of them:
The Trader: In the first half of Darkwood, the trader appears every morning. He sells you a variety of very useful stuff like gasoline, bullets, gun parts, food. He also talks to you and gives you advice and is generally very supportive. There’s a big twist with this character and I won’t spoil it, but I will say that he likes you for the same reason he likes himself. There’s your hint.
The Musician: He’s a little boy who is part of the two main questlines. He’s a very sick boy, obsessed with the Pretty Lady and his violin.
The Chicken Lady: Lives in a house in The Village, along with her sister-
The Pretty Lady: Not pretty at all. Mutated and deformed. The reason the Musician likes her is because they have the same variant of the plague. It’s kinda cute.
The Doctor: He knows more of what’s going on than anyone else. He’s also the guy who saves you at the beginning. If you would like, you can develop a mutually beneficial relationship that will persist, somewhat, to the end of the game.
The Wolfman: This character is really the heart and soul of this game. Evil, violent and sadistic, he’s the other guy with a major questline. He’s not only at home in the forest, he seems to genuinely enjoy it here. He has many schemes and agendas, all of which have negative consequences for other denizens of the forest. Sometimes, that list of denizens can include you.
Piotrek: A young man obsessed with space travel. Quite insane. His questline has you bringing him engine parts to build a rocket, which is how he plans to escape.
The Cripple: An old man who is the sole survivor of his village and has crucial lore that can help you escape.
The Three: In the second half of the game, the Trader is no longer featured and these guys will be your merchants. They are mute, highly intelligent savages that know the Darkwood like the back of their hand.
And that’s just a few of the colorful characters you meet. There’s a whole lot of subplots and lore related shit to dig into in this game.
04. THE DARKWOOD
So, what does this world look like? What kind of enemies live here? Let’s do a little cursory sweep. It could be viewed as a little spoilery but you’ll live.
ENEMIES:
(This is not a comprehensive list because this is not a wiki.)
Dogs: Self explanatory. There’s lot of them and they are annoying. They’re that enemy that doesn’t kill you most of the time but can set you back.
Elk: Self explanatory, but what makes them a problem? They’re huge and do a lot of damage.
Savages: Your garden variety plague infected human who is crazy enough to want to kill you but healthy enough to still be human.
Mushroom Men: Kamikaze bombers, but with mushroom spores.
Human Spiders: Horrific messes of conjoined bodies that use their limbs as projectiles and replicate from said limbs. Not actually as tough as that sounds, but still dangerous.
Human Centipedes: These things burrow underneath you and are annoying but still not as bad as the spiders.
Banshees: Scary gimmick enemies that activate upon being seen and sent hoards of babies at you. Kill with fire.
Chompers: The most iconic enemy in the game. Some humans, when sick with the plague, begin developing a gash in their head that sprouts teeth, and eventually that gash runs to the torso and they cease being a human and become one of these things-
Art was taken from a Redditor named “Cypsee.” Not mine. All his/hers.
LOCATIONS:
The Dry Meadow: This is the first area you’ll be in. It’s pretty easy and home to the following enemy types: dogs, elk, savages and in one spot, a Chomper. It’s mostly wide open space (a meadow!), with a few landmarks here and there, but nothing overly consequential. It’s as safe as this game gets.
The Silent Forest: This is the sweet spot where competency meets difficulty in my opinion. A few Chompers, more dogs, more savages and possibly some Banshees depending on your luck. This area is still pretty open but does have dense patches of trees. It’s also the most populated, featuring The Village, Piotrek’s house and a lot of savages in camps.
The Old Woods: This place sucks. It’s chocked to the gills with Chompers. The hideout is horrible and almost impossible to defend. The sidequests just push you from “area infested with chompers” to “area that’s REALLY infested with Chompers.” This area is the one where people typically just spend the night somewhere else. It’s not worth it.
The Tunnels: Smaller area that is pivotal to the plot, but rarely dangerous. Not really an “area” in the same way.
The Swamp: A mega area that is the same size as 1-3 combined and is where the second half of the game takes place. Not as dangerous as the Old Woods but still very dicey. Loot drops are better here. This is probably the coolest area of the game. It provides the most exposition, most options and is probably the most focused overall section.
This is an example of your map. The locations and their size and shape are slightly different every play through.
05. DARKWOOD AND ME
So, what did I think of this game I just spent like 3 hours writing about? I’ve said words like “brilliant, genius, terrifying, dreadful, horrible, wonderful and scary”. But perhaps the strongest word would be resonant. This game really resonated with me on every level. It makes a statement about the human condition.
Everything is awful and really hard. It’s hopeless and scary and unhinged and sadistic, but also mundane and dull. You could apply that same description to living in the 2020s. The game feels like living IS. I mean, sure, we don’t live in an alien seeded (spoiler) dark forest that’s full of monsters and crazy people, but metaphorically, maybe we do. Believe it or not, uncertainty and dread are things that are just as real whether they are in our minds or in our eyes. Darkwood knows this and it embraces it.
The gameplay feels like how a real human would move-slow, unconfident and desperate. The writing is steeped in the darkest, realest evils that existence has to offer, from sorrow to rage to vengeance to memory. The world of the game is dark and lonely, but still alive enough to make you fight to survive. The characters are all unique and interesting and their stories are often heartbreaking. Darkwood executes soul breaking, spirit crushing moments at every level in every aspect. It’s truly a magnificent work of art in this way.
The reason it’s the scariest game I’ve ever played is because it’s so emotionally immersive that you find the game staying with you long after you’ve turned it off. At several points, I didn’t even want to play the game, because I dreaded having to spend another night in the woods, being hunted by monsters.
Darkwood is an incredible game, an experience you have to have at least once that will have you never wanting to do it again. It turns challenge into a reward and turns Catch-22s into opportunities. It’s truly a grim experience that molds you in a way that no other game can. You learn a lot, about sadness, about hopes and dashed dreams, about humanity and about yourself. Your morals will be tested, you’ll spend some nights with the lights on and when you finish, you’ll say “I never knew I was that tough.” It’s about challenge, fear, risk and choices. So is life.
