Hotline Miami is often mentioned whenever a game nails fast-paced, stylish, and excessive violence - like samurai side-scroller Katana Zero - or uses a top-down view to create a merciful bit of distance from horrifying scenes. Where Silent Hill 2 shapes its visuals around the dilapidated browns and hazy greys of rust, fog, and rotting drywall, Darkwood's art captures the essence of gnarled roots, grimy fungus, and viny growths to create the effect that nature is slowly exterminating every trace of humanity. Each swing of a melee weapon feels labored and weighty, both from the audio feedback and the hit to your stamina. Running when you're not being actively chased is a gamble, lest you get winded just as some unseen danger approaches. Your visible but unobtrusive stamina bar gives a clear cost to any strenuous action. The Silent Hill comparison is the clearest in my mind, what with the exploration of a twisted realm, the purposely sluggish combat, and a world with an aesthetic that mirrors the death and decay at the heart of the main story. It's always easiest to understand an unfamiliar game through the traits of known quantities, so I'd liken Darkwood to a mix of Silent Hill, Hotline Miami, and the Metro series. At night, you have to bunker down in your makeshift hideout, dragging furniture in front of doorways and boarding up the windows, in the hopes that you'll survive the onslaught of enemies who seek to snuff you out when the sun is down. During the day, you need to scavenge for crafting materials and look for an escape route inside a procedurally generated map with prescribed landmarks. Your origins are a mystery, but you suddenly find yourself deep inside a forest so thick that its infinite trees have grown into an impassable barrier, imprisoning all the townsfolk who have started going mad from their disconnect to the rest of the world.Īs a top-down game, Darkwood trades the in-your-face terror of something like The Forest for a bird's-eye view of your treacherous surroundings, using line-of-sight lighting to great effect when you're scurrying through claustrophobic passageways and decrepit houses. You awake in Darkwood as the captive of a crazed doctor who's dragged your unconscious body into his home - and things only get freakier from there.
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