Darkwood Does Horror From the Top

From the shadowy realm of Poland comes Darkwood, an indie survival-horror game that approaches the genre from a slightly different perspective.

Can top-down horror work? I don’t know, but with first-person games cluttering up the genre, it’s nice to see somebody trying something a little different. And while it might not be “hide in a corner and pray” kind of scary, Darkwood does look like it has some real potential as an atmospheric survival-horror experience.

Darkwood promises “hardcore gameplay” with “no hand-holding, tooltips or linear paths” in a procedurally-generated and deeply twisted world. Characters will improve with perks and abilities and a crafting system will help improve the odds of survival, but if you do happen to die, you’re really and truly dead: Permadeath makes reckless behavior a bad idea. And it’s not about zombies! While there will be enemies similar to zombies, there are plenty of other dangerous creatures as well, each with their own “characteristic behaviors and goals.”

The gameplay trailer doesn’t show off anything particularly horrifying but the ambiance looks great, especially for a “pre-alpha,” and the promise of a survival-horror RPG/rogue-like crossover set in a well-defined, real-time world is hot stuff indeed. It’s being made for Windows, although Linux and Mac versions may be developed as well if the crowdfunding campaign, which isn’t yet underway, brings in sufficient funds; the same holds true for co-op multiplayer.

Details about Darkwood can be found at darkwoodgame.com. No release date has been set, but Darkwood is now up for voting on Steam Greenlight and while I would never presume to tell you what to do, you should definitely vote for it.