Darkwood is a lot stranger than I expected. I was drawn to it by the promise of no jump scares – I wondered whether a horror game really could resist the urge to suddenly surprise me, and if it couldn’t, how it could scare me. It also happened to be Halloween so I wanted to be scared, and Darkwood had just arrived on PS5, so the um, pumpkins aligned.
Darkwood
- Developer: Acid Wizard Games / Crunching Koalas (PS5)
- Publisher: Acid Wizard Games
- Platform: Played on PS5
- Availability: Released 2017 on PC, and 28th October 2022 on PS5
But now I feel misled. Not because Darkwood isn’t scary, or because it uses jump scares – it has surprised me a few times (maybe there’s no getting away from this in horror), though not enough to suggest it leans on this as a scare tactic. But because reducing Darkwood to a conversation about scares misses so much of what I think it’s about.
Darkwood is deep – surprisingly so. It’s surprising because the top-down, retro presentation – it’s quite like Hotline Miami but without the lurid colours – and the base-defence set-up make it feel quite simple. You’ve played this kind of game a million times before. Find wood to barricade windows. Find fuel to power a generator. Craft things. Keep the lights on, keep the enemies away at night.
But it’s what’s underneath, and what starts to emerge in time, that makes Darkwood so much more. Take the tutorial, for instance. It’s not what you expect. You’re some bloke trapped in a cabin in the woods, and as you explore the cabin, you find cages, but you can’t clearly see what’s going on because the lights are dim – the game loves playing around with light. It all feels slightly wrong and ominous. Then a stranger arrives and you capture him.