"All roads lead deeper into the forest."

Darkwood is a survival horror video game developed and published by Acid Wizard Studio

Story
Darkwood is set in late 1980's Poland, where strange forest devoured large amount of area, turning it into nightmare. Those who were trapped inside are affected by strange plague that kills or transforms survivors into monsters, while still sane seek a way out of the green hell.

You play as a mysterious stranger who wakes up in the middle of the forest after brutal events that took place last night, including unknown accident that left him wounded and brutal interrogation by his "saviour". With same goal as everyone else, he sets out to escape, whether forest will like it or not.

Gameplay
Before you dive into the main part of the game, it's worth to play Prologue to learn basic mechanics, controls and tid bits of story. Important considering actual game is very harsh and won't bother holding your hand.

Darkwood plays from top-down perspective, providing a procedurally generated yet with handcrafted locations semi-open world to navigate and day/night cycle. Your main goal is to escape, but let's say it has multiple smaller steps, unique characters and monstrous creatures in between blocking your path, so learning how to survive is a priority. During the day you get out of your hideout to navigate mysterious, twisted forest, while at sunset you crawl back, barricade the windows and hope to see the daylight.

Everyday as you wake up refreshed in a hideout, your little somewhat-safe haven among the green pastures of hell, you get to prepare yourself for another venture into darkwood. Most important elements inside are kitchen and workshop. Collect meat and different shrooms, cook them up and level up to gain new abilities that will help you survive. To make it spicy, you have to also pick a negative aspect alongside it! Workshop provides a place to stash items and craft tools, materials or weapons, with option to upgrade it to unlock more items to craft. Here you come to rather obvious conclusion quite quickly: in Darkwood, everything you find is important, and learning how to use it is a key to success.

Once you are all stocked up, with plan in your mind, it is time for a trip! Procedurally generated map means layout will be different everytime you start a new game, but important story places will always appear. Explore the forest to discover creepy ruins, wrecked machines, abandoned places, some locked and some open, all with resources to loot. With limited inventory, better be sure to know what to grab and what to get another time. It all sounds pretty simple, but habitats of darkwood won't make it such. Wild dogs, cultists, swamp monsters, spidermans (not the fun type), and way more monstrous abominations hunger for your flesh. Protect yourself with variety of melee weapons (and firearms), all coming with different range, size, and attacks, just like your fellow forest neighbours who want you dead! Keep them in nice condition as game features durability, and improve them at workshop. There are also extra worthy items, from source of light to traps and bandages, worthy of keeping for encounters with habitats of darkwood. Don't fret however. Death will take you back to your safehouse and only for a small toll of some items in the inventory, so keep best stuff at the hotbar to not lose it. You can also venture into the area you died to recover your goods! (Death outcome varies on difficulty)
Worth mentioning it ain't all gloomy. You do have a journal which will keep most important information, featuring key items, notes, and a selfmade map that updates as you explore!

Once your vision cone starts to turn orange, it means sun goes down and so does your chance of living. Go back to a hideout, use materials to barricade, set up traps, store items and better fuel up most important aspect: generator. It powers up lights, and lights grant better vision and a bit of comfort among the sea of darkness. At time goes past 8 and night starts, your goal is simple: survive. And who knows what will forest bring out at night to get rid of you, living and not...

After every night, no matter how it ended, you get a visit from local Trader with certain amount of goods ready to be exchanged, and a nice timefreeze to consider your next moves without pressure. Reputation is a currency of Darkwood, as every item comes with certain value of it. You also get it for surviving the nights so keeping your guts inside throughtout them is more than recommended! Use reputation to obtain materials, ammunition or parts and keep eyes open as during exploration you might find other traders too.

Playtime and replayability
It took me 16 hours to beat the game, but playtime is flexible due to nature of Darkwood, so it is difficult to point out just how long it might take you to wrap it up.
You can give forest trip another go to select different choices throughout your journey and see how they will impact your game, or attempt to ramp up the difficulty to raise the stakes even higher. Try your hand with limited number of lives or simply go hardcore with permadeath.

Pros and cons
Darkwood provides a lot of survival horror goodness and quite nicely balances it out to offer one terrific experience that won't hold back, offering you a little taste of what is to come in Prologue and turning it up in actual game. Gameplay might not bring anything new to the genre, but it is still very enjoyable. Expect first few hours to be painful as you tend to learn how world operates, what do and what not quite. But once you get aclimated, it all starts to click and grow. Exploration feels natural as you desire to investigate mysterious, creepy areas and scavenge for loot, with brutal, intense combat that can surprise you with encounters at every step of the way. Fantastic design of enemies with decent chunk of them inspired by slavic folklore, utilization of top down perspective, terrific atmosphere, outstanding soundtrack and unforgiving combat make horror aspects of Darkwood deliver on every front, as navigating seemingly abandoned locations with limited resources and field of view, reeking of death and lore is scary, intense yet addictive. Game doesn't come with jumpscares, every once in a while enemy will ambush you to check if you are aware but most of the time it's environment with audiovisual design that does the heavy lifting.

Darkwood is a game that respects you and your desire to experience something tad more fresh from usual survival horror mixture, it will be painful in few moments, will take a moment to get used to, you might get frustrated with possible lack of progress but it only makes game better, it enchances the painful part of hellish experience forest is supposed to bring.

Final words and conclusion
Be sure to get Artwork and Soundtrack DLC to support develo...what's that? Indefinite hiatus? 5 to 10 years? ...oh...alright....ahem.

Slavic folklore meets lovecraftian atmosphere with great gameplay on top! Darkwood is one fantastic survival horror game, where fight among forest terrors is an absolute treat.

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