The wonderful top-down survival horror game Darkwood from developer Acid Wizard Studios has been confirmed to be coming to PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch this month.
For those who don’t know, Darkwood originally launched on PC back in 2017, and it combined exploration, resource-gathering, crafting, and combat to create a peculiar yet frightening horror-survival experience.
Darkwood - Console Launch Trailer
Right off the bat you’re greeted with a breathtaking opening sequence that’ll immediately set you off balance. Afterward, Darkwood makes use of every mean at its disposal to surprise, confuse, and unnerve you. For example, the game gives you a full map of the forest, but for the most part you won’t be able to rely on it to determine your location, as you can only see the majority of your actions through a limited field of vision.
Yes, you can see your immediate surroundings at all time, but important items won’t be visible unless you catch them in your line of sight. The same goes for enemies as well. You can often feel their presence, hear doors opening/closing, furniture moving, but you can never see them. It is the unknown that is the most terrifying. Darkwood understands that very well and makes the most out of it.
Every morning, you leave your cabin and go deeper into the Darkwood to look for supplies, points of interest, and maybe even other forest dwellers, uncovering mystery after mystery on your quest to freedom. It might seem bleak at first, but as you progress, things start to become increasingly surreal and suffocating.
And then night falls – and with it comes the Darkwood's most terrible inhabitants. Your only hope of staying alive is locking yourself inside your cabin, desperately trying to keep the lights on, and hoping that you make it until the sun rises with whatever weapons you might have acquired. It is an inevitability, a looming threat that stresses you out every day, yet it is those moments that make you appreciate daylight and motivate you to keep forging onward.
Darkwood is definitely not a game that everyone can enjoy. It's confusing, it’s stressful, it’s exhausting, yet at its core the design is astoundingly intelligent. If you can appreciate it, you will find that this is one of the most haunting and satisfying horror games in the market at the moment.
If you are interested, Darkwood is coming to PS4 on May 14th, and the Xbox One and Switch versions will arrive a few days after that. Depending on the platform, the price should range between £13 and £15 (Rs 1180 to 1360).
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