When Darkwood originally launched in early access in 2014, it was an ambitious game that suffered from clunkiness and a lack of identity. In GameSpot's early access review, writer Brett Todd admired its willingness to experiment with aesthetics and rework the concept of permadeath, but couldn't get past the fact that it wasn't quite ready to go on sale. Now, in 2019, Darkwood is an entirely new game.
It was inevitable that Darkwood would be compared to similar open-world survival games like the Burtonesque Don't Starve, and from a gameplay standpoint their top-down perspectives and day/night cycles are similar. However, the most recent iteration of this macabre indie game is unwaveringly confident in itself. Darkwood revels in its eponymous darkness--even its daytime cycles are subjected to limited visibility, courtesy of its field-of-vision illumination. The best thing about this is that it doesn't rely on nighttime to be scary. Even at the crack of dawn, venturing too far from your hideout can result in you coming face to face with blood-curdling, satanic sadists hellbent on mauling you to death.
The game assimilates a plethora of systems into its makeup, including crafting, bartering, and combat. Although the mechanics are quite complex, Darkwood offers an intense but fair learning curve. While the controls are clearly mapped out on the pause menu, learning how to manipulate some of the game's ostensibly unimportant mechanics can give you a major edge as you progress into its more difficult areas. For example, the game affords you skills in exchange for cooking in ominous ovens. These skills usually only have a minor impact on the game, allowing you to benefit from a daily single-use perk such as running without taking stamina into account. However, these perks come at a cost: For every skill you gain, you must apply a negative effect designed to hinder you for the rest of your playthrough. These are incredibly minor, but in a game as brutally unforgiving as Darkwood, it's essential to level up with caution, which subverts the entire idea of leveling up rapidly in the first place.
As a result, opting to favor survivability over gratifyingly quick forward momentum often allows you to live longer in the end--something that's absolutely essential on Darkwood's harder modes, where lives are limited. But even on Normal difficulty, it's important that you recognize that this is an ambiguous world that necessitates experimentation. As the world deteriorates into madness around you, the only way to survive is to adapt alongside decay. Rather than help you, Darkwood's systems affect you in a much more neutral way. I spent a night boarded up in a hideout that was fortified to the teeth with barriers only to be attacked by packs of demonic dogs moments before the saving grace of the sunrise. However, I also happened to survive three nights in a row by hiding inconspicuously in a cramped corner, praying that I wasn't overwhelmed by hordes of red chompers in the twilight.
Because you're never truly safe in Darkwood, it's easy to lose track of time. Eventually, days seem to merge into one another, and it becomes startlingly clear that the majority of society has descended into an irreparable state of madness. People live in a perpetually frozen cycle of day and night in which there are only two recurring parts of the same day, repeated eternally. The characters you meet are mostly uninterested in speaking with you, but among the Silent Forest's more amicable residents are an aspiring astronaut named Piotrek, who is attempting to build a rocket ship out of hunks of scrap metal, and a muttering musician who plays dissonant, apocalyptic notes on a broken violin in an effort to win the hand of a woman kept locked in the basement by her older sister--something made all the more horrifying by how poorly he performs. These post-plague virtuosos are at home in Darkwood's chaos, and their chosen vocations reflect the fact that they've already been absorbed by the chaos of this dynamic and disintegrating world. That's one of the most horrifying things about Darkwood: the way in which humanity learns to use madness as an asset in a world without order.
That's one of the most horrifying things about Darkwood: the way in which humanity learns to use madness as an asset in a world without order.
There are, however, some aspects of Darkwood that indicate the transient nature of life in the forest. At the beginning of the game, you're given the opportunity to euthanize your wounded dog, who sits outside your house whimpering in pain. If you choose not to, the dog transforms into a vicious varmint by the time you return later, ferociously clawing and gnawing at you in a deranged state of mindless violence. Darkwood's narrative is ambiguous at the best of times and is mostly to do with choosing which NPCs to favor in various subplots, but easily-overlooked details like this dog's fate tell disturbing tales of their own. As a result, some subplots only tell part of the story. Other details are intricately interwoven into the environment, and these narrative manifestations and the more ostensible plot points are of equal importance in understanding the world at large.
That's what makes Darkwood so brilliantly-suited to console. Although on the surface a keyboard suits the game's mechanics--namely its hotfixed inventory system and the quickfire solutions that are often necessary for survival in the night--there's something much more visceral about playing with analog sticks and haptic feedback. Instead of simply pressing a combination of keys to attack anathemic abominations, you need to use hyper-sensitive camera control to succeed in combat. Dodging is mapped to an analog click, whereas shooting a gun genuinely feels instinctive because enemies close distance at an alarming rate. It's easy to miss point-blank because of a knee-jerk reaction, and it's the fact that you can be punished once and for all for doing so that makes the game all the more hair-raising.
What makes Darkwood truly special, though, is its world. At one point in the game, you visit an area simply known as "The Village." Here, a group of deranged denizens worship a gnarled sow, deifying it as "The Mother of all Pigs." Almost everyone in the village has descended into a state of utter insanity, with one of the town's most domineering residents having developed a gravitation toward chickens after locking up her own sister to save her marrying a chagrined musician. Most of the citizens here immediately associate you with an aura of antipathy, but the fact they live in such an aloof society is horrifying. All around, the world is darkening and fading, and this singular town, serving as a bastion against a descent into savagery, is inevitably lost. Because you, the safe and sound player, get to witness it from an external perspective, The Village's encroaching demise is drastically more affecting. This is the last of the world, and it's due to go out not with a bang, but a whimper.
While Darkwood is an absolute marvel in terms of its aesthetics and gameplay--as well as its disarmingly dissonant score--I experienced several bugs that caused me to lose minor progress. In one case, I was trapped behind a disassembled tractor, which forced me to quit to the main menu and restart the game in order to press onward. On top of this, one of the game's areas caused the frame rate to drop so dramatically that playing became a chore. This was easily rectified, again simply requiring a soft reboot, but these glitches are a disappointing nuisance plaguing an otherwise exceptional game.
However, these bugs aren't game-breaking. And even though they irritated me, I couldn't pull myself away from Darkwood, no matter how much its uncanny world made me audibly squeal. Rather than relying on jump scares--although they are present, to a minor degree--Darkwood psychologically unhinges you. You're consistently lured into a false sense of security as you hole up in an ironclad hideaway before night falls, or when seemingly benevolent NPCs beguile you with promises of collaboration against the hordes of darkness. It's horror by subversion, because it's only when you're safest that you let your guard down--and it's only when you take that singular breath of respite that you concede to utter susceptibility. There's nothing quite as scary as momentarily looking away before being drawn back in by a sound cue or a controller vibration. And before you know it, it's fight or flight, as you fall into the fray of the unforgiving darkness and are forced to compose yourself within a split second or risk losing half your inventory.
In Darkwood, there's an item you can show several NPCs called "photo of a road." What's interesting about this is that several of these entirely disparate wanderers have the exact same response to this curious snapshot. "Around here," they say, "all roads lead to nowhere." And as Darkwood's forest is guzzled up by the rapidly encroaching night, roads are no longer places-between-places. Instead, they're a communal necropolis, waiting for the creatures of the night to tribute more destitute dupes to its earthy, deathly soil.
One of the most macabre scenes in A Plague Tale: Innocence is the eponymous plague, manifesting in the form of cursed rats. These vermin have a malevolent, otherworldly presence, their incessant screeching and scratching on stone pavements and atop piles of corpses making for a nightmarish, cacophonous din. Like sewage sludge, these creatures pour out of crevices towards their unwitting victims, ravaging them until they are just skin and bones. It's an incredibly grotesque and spine-chilling sight--one that will linger in your mind hours later.
But even though the rats are a constant presence in Innocence, they merely serve as the backdrop for its more poignant moments, featuring the two characters you'll spend the bulk of your time with: Amicia and Hugo de Rune, a pair of young siblings who are suddenly thrust into this hellscape of war and pestilence. Set amidst the Hundred Years' War during the Middle Ages, the comfort the siblings once knew as children to a noble French family has been ruthlessly shattered. The Black Death, too, has wrought terror upon the country, with the bulk of the French population either dying from the plague or eaten by rats. Compounding this is the Inquisition, a fanatical group of knights keen to get their hands on the last of the de Rune descendants. Surrounded with sludgy pools of grimy rats, and with murderous knights hunting them down at every other turn, the duo need to gather their wits, leaning on stealthier means to escape from this mess. But not only do you have to navigate through the bedlam as the teenage Amicia, you'll also have to take care of the five-year-old Hugo; he panics and shouts for Amicia when she ventures too far from him--as any young child will presumably do when surrounded by a neverending miasma of death and decay.
With survival being the thematic core of the game, Innocence is, at its crux, a series of survival puzzles; you'll need to avoid the ravenous rat colonies, as well as evade the knights of the Inquisition. The rodents are terrified of light and will scuttle away at its mere presence--a weakness you can exploit to make your way across death-stricken battlefields and cities. Yet key to survival is also vigilance; wander too close to the rats, and they will attempt to devour you, clawing at the fringes of the light as their teeth chatter with insatiable hunger. And when a few stray rodents manage to latch onto you, Amicia can drown in a whirlpool of vermin, as they viciously and noisily gnaw on her. Few scenes in video games manage to be quite as eerie as this, heightening the game's cloying atmosphere of despair and danger.
What's decidedly less impressive, however, are the members of the Inquisition. As children, Amicia and Hugo won't survive most direct confrontations with these armored brutes, who are only too eager to swing their cudgels and swords upon discovering them. Luckily for the de Rune siblings, the knights are also dumb as rocks; these barbarians are easily distracted by loud noises or sudden movements, such as by smashing a pot near their feet or tossing a rock towards a nearby chest full of armor. After staring at the offending object for a minute, the knight will mutter a variant of "Guess it's just my imagination"--the most hackneyed and quintessential line used by hilariously obtuse NPCs in stealth games--and lumber back to their post, completely bewildered by the sound. In another far more egregious gaffe, another knight, while gawking at rats stripping his comrade to the bones, would grouse about the pointlessness of searching for his murderer, since they must be far gone by now. He then settled back to his programmed patrol, his back turned against the torrent of crazed rodents. For a game whose storytelling relies heavily on its atmosphere of dread and fear, such illogical instances absolutely butcher the mood.
That said, the game's puzzles eventually ramp up in difficulty in later chapters, which renders combat and confrontations unavoidable at certain points. As dim-witted as the knights are, they're still mostly decked out in heavy armor and weaponry--and can make devastating enemies. To compensate for her lack of brute strength, Amicia can modify and augment her trusty slingshot and ammunitions with the right materials and a dash of basic alchemy, turning the humble tool into a deadly and versatile weapon. Hugo isn't a passive companion either; reaching cramped, hard-to-access places is his forte, and he's gutsy enough to crawl through smaller breaches in walls alone to open up new paths for Amicia--provided the coast is cleared. Other characters, like a talented young alchemist named Lucas and a pair of orphaned thieves called Mellie and Arthur, will come with vastly different capabilities--and each with their own affairs to settle in this dire tale.
Scenes of desolation and tragedy mark Innocence's dark, intriguing world, tied together with a narrative that's genuinely moving without resorting to fetishizing the children's sufferings. Despite their challenging situation, the siblings make do with what little help they get, bolstered by Amicia's astounding resourcefulness, to survive this catastrophic mess. The game also magnifies the cataclysmic impact of the Black Death through a lens of cosmic horror, invoking the frightful atmosphere of H.P. Lovecraft's macabre stories; the slithering rats, whether they are scurrying in the dank blackness beneath the city or trailing around half-eaten cadavers, never fails to be disconcerting. On the other hand, its villainous characters are almost painfully one-dimensional, with predictable twists and turns in the plot. This renders some of its revelations lackluster.
Powerfully ghoulish depictions of the plague and rats aside, Innocence is ultimately an emotive story of resilience against harrowing odds. The game's title is an obvious nod towards the loss of innocence the endearing young cast faces throughout their journey. But more than that, it also speaks of the depths of human depravity and the agonizing cost of survival in the midst of war. Despite the unremitting horrors of Innocence's beginnings, the game occasionally lets in a faint glimpse of hope. One of my favorite moments is when Amicia spots another wildflower in a lone trek across the city, nestled among the decay of the rats' revolting nests. Without her brother around, she picks it up, and places it gingerly in her own hair--a personal reminder to keep trudging on amidst the hardships, and a testament to her growing strength and tenacity. Despite flashes of predictability, moments like these will bring a lump to your throat, as it did mine.
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