Darkwood Leaving Steam Early Access On August 17th
Darkwood, the top-down survival horror game from Acid Wizard Studio, is finally ending its three year stint in Steam early access next month. The game will be released for real on August 17th, and it now has a disturbing live-action trailer to lure you in with.
The trailer seems like it’s mostly aimed at the crowd that has already bought the game – it might be thematically fitting, but it will not tell you absolutely anything about the game. It consists of a string of seemingly unrelated sceenes – a naked woman entering a gloomy forest, a derelict house standing in the middle of a field, a dead bird burning above a stone well, an agitated dog barking at something off-screen, a scarecrow with its head on fire. It’s definitely some ominous stuff, but hardly what you’d call representative.
A quick trip to the game’s Steam page will tell you everything you need to know, though. It’s a top-down survival horror game in which you explore randomly generated areas by day, then cower in your hiding hole by night. Daylight allows you to scavenge, talk to some weird creatures you should definitely not trust and craft weapons. Night is all about surviving until dawn. You will be attacked, but you won’t be defenceless – you can set up traps for the intruders, build barricades or simply hide and hope for the best. You’ll progress by injecting yourself with liquid skill points, which you collect from fallen enemies.
The main selling points seem to be the weird characters and their intricate stories, as well as the fact that the world around you will constantly change. Getting through a particularly tough night only to discover that nothing outside is the way it was sounds terrible in all the right ways. Now only if it had a collector’s edition that came with adult diapers.
