Darkwood

We’ve been battered by wave after wave of survival romps since Minecraft popularised the genre, with its deadly nights and groaning zombies, almost a decade ago. In its wake, we've been introduced to a cavalcade of punishing, persistent environments intent on putting us in an early grave. The masochistic impulse to put ourselves through the wringer for entertainment has spread to RPGs, management games, cosmic…

Tagged with best games, feature, Ark: Survival Evolved, Astroneer, Darkwood, DayZ, Don't Starve, Don't Starve Together, Frostpunk, Neo Scavenger, Project Zomboid, RimWorld, Rust, Starbound, State of Decay, Subnautica, Sunless Sea, Terraria, The Forest, The Long Dark, This War of Mine.

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Darkwood [official site]. “All roads lead deeper into the woods,” says one of the twisted characters in Darkwood, an excellent and haunting game of survival in a nightmarish forest. There are horrors in its tangles of subsuming wood, things…

Tagged with Acid Wizard Studio, Artur Kordas, design, feature, Gustaw Stachaszewski, permadeath, procedural generation, The Mechanic, Darkwood.

To compile a list of the 25 best horror games on PC is to look into the void for so long that the void not only starts to look back, but shakes you by the hand and takes you out for coffee. It is to fight with monsters until you become a monster and then go on a European railtrip with the other monsters, and…

Tagged with best games, Best Horror Games, feature, knock knock, Long Legs, My Father's Long, Teleglitch: Die More Edition, Alien: Isolation, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Anatomy, Blood, condemned: criminal origins, Darkwood, Dead Space 2, Depths of Fear :: Knossos, Detention, F.E.A.R., Inside, Left 4 Dead 2, lone survivor, Observer, Pathologic, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat, Silent Hill 2, Stories Untold, Sylvio, System Shock 2, Teleglitch. The Evil Within.

I've been looking forward to Darkwood for a long time. It's a top-down survival horror game with crafting elements, but early videos contained a hint of surrealism that helped the game to stand out from the crowd. Now that it has launched in Early Access, I've spent an hour exploring the early stages. It's a slow-paced Teleglitch, a survival horror game by way of Ice-Pick…

Tagged with Acid Wizard Studio, early access, feature, horror, impressions, preview, Darkwood.