Darkwood

spicy

Uninspired, boring, the sound design is the only nice thing that could be said about this game.

I don't know if this game is horror, but it's not even a little scary. At its core, it's just a survival crafting game with some really annoying mechanics designed to pad out play time. (Clunky controls, steep learning curve in combat, tiny inventory, long walks from re-spawn point to find your corpse, mandatory "base defence" sections at night that feel like a chore) I've played for 5 hours and the story is nowhere to be seen (except for a couple of small suggestive bits in the prologue). You're just trying to survive as random spooky stuff is happening around you, but there is no context for any of it and no reason to get invested in the hero's struggle. In short, this is not so much survival horror as survival chore. Something to play if you want to recreate the experience of washing your dishes with a toothbrush and no running water, all without getting off your chair.

The worst thing I have to say about this game was that beyond not enjoying the experience of playing it, I also hated looking at it: everything from the zoomed-out top-down camera to the tiny white text made this so much worse. From my first hour alone I could tell that this would be one of those games where clunky controls and busywork would lead to so much frustration that I know for a fact there WILL come a moment where it makes me so mad that all immersion into the horror of it is forgotten as I just fight the game itself. And I'm old enough now not to bother and not to engage. Nothing about it intrigues me enough where I'd rather play this ugly eyesore than anything else anyway, so I don't see it as a loss. I think what this reminds me of most is those horror games on web. Something about it just strikes me as cheap, and not in an endearing way.

Not commenting this is in anyway a bad survival game and initally I found this experience to be quite atmospheric. Just to slow paced for my tastes that is all. Way to much calm before a thrilling storm.