Darkwood was made by three people, and we’re all scaredy-cats,â dev Gustaw Stachaszewski. âWe find it much more engaging to experience horror that
Alone in a decrepit building, swallowed whole by a forest that is simultaneously encroaching and expanding, a stranger inhales the hideous waft of a myopic decoction cooked up to imbue them with curious powers.
With dilated pupils, they begin to drink in the desolate landscapes that assimilate into an illusory horizon, as the limited field of visibility causes the world to implode into a microcosmic sphere of darkness and terror.
Developed by Acid Wizard Studio, Darkwood is an indie survival horror game set in a Soviet Bloc-cum-supernatural forest. These woods are plagued by a perpetual darkness, and even when the stars subside and the sun rises to combat the forces of night, the world is obfuscated by an eerie hue of murk and opacity.
“When we were starting work on Darkwood, the overwhelming trend in cinema and games in the horror genre was using jump-scares as the tool to make the audience feel fear,” Gustaw Stachaszewski, one of the three developers of Darkwood, tells me. “The reaction to sudden auditory or visual stimuli is a very basic survival mechanism shared by all species that have to protect themselves against predators, and as such is accompanied by elevated heart rate and an adrenaline rush.”
Although jump-scares have become a staple of traditional horror, Darkwood actively eschews them for a more concentrated, psychological brand. Instead of having monsters jump out at you from behind locked doors, it allows you to see the movement of objects in the distance without displaying what it was that moved them.
You know something is there, and you can see the evidence of its presence, but because the exact details of the movement are eclipsed by an invisible veil, the entire idea of what constitutes a jump-scare in the first place is completely subverted.
“Jump scares are effective and entertaining to experience yourself or to watch someone else react to them, especially your favorite streamer,” Gustaw explains. “But to us, the overuse of such tactics feels shallow.”
However, Acid Wizard’s reluctance to use jump-scares runs far deeper than merely viewing them as a cheap stratagem. Although the team consider them to be cursory, their implementation of alternative systems comes from somewhere else entirely.
“Darkwood was made by three people, and we’re all scaredy-cats with pretty wild and vivid imaginations,” Gustaw tells me.
