Welcome to Oakwood, a long abandoned campground nestled in the forests of British Columbia. Explore the woods, caves, and a dilapidated lodge in search of your friends, while surviving the prehistoric horrors that now haunt the grounds.
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Had some genuinely frightening moments where you didn't know if the sounds coming around you were a threat or a warning, along with a memorable game over screen should you be caught. The story felt very tacked on, though, I would have really liked to see more fleshed out writing and ideas be thrown in this.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/10/17/oakwood-2018-review/
You are going up to Oakwood, an abandoned campground, to meet up with your friends and spend the weekend having fun. Arriving late, you find your friends campsite abandoned, clothes and items strewn across the ground. As you head a scream in the distance, you run to find out what happened to them, and you soon find yourself trying to escape from the deadliest creatures from history.
I don’t quite know why you would go to an abandoned campground of all places to camp when there are probably a lot of other nicer places to camp with a lot of similar activities, but I guess that wouldn’t be as interesting as going to an abandoned place where no body would find you.
While the game has you spend most if walking through the dark with a flashlight, thankfully it doesn’t include needing to collect batteries for your flashlight like a lot of these games have. At some point, you move over to Night Vision Goggles, but that’s almost immediately after your flashlight breaks.
Even though the game doesn’t quite have the budget to make the visuals live up to it’s ambition, the game tries it’s hardest to add a few bits here and there to make it seem as creepy as possible. Outside of the few jump scares that a lot of horror games have, you can hear the occasional scream in the distance or see a pool of blood that leads off into the distance as one of your friends was dragged of, there is enough to keep this game afloat in terms of scares. There’s even a few sections where you have to run through long grass as dinosaurs run passed you out of the corner of your eye. Sure, it’s all predictable, but it’s more effort than some other bigger games have put in.
It does have notes that you can pick up throughout the game, but they all make sense as to why they’re there, with most of the notes done by your friends located at where their camp site is, and the ones featuring the history of the park located in draws in the campground building. It adds a bit of flavor to an otherwise forgettable short horror game.
Throughout the game, there are collectable totems, and if you collect all of them through one of your playthroughs, there is a slightly out of the way door you can find and open. I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s a nice little addition that adds some replayability and variety to the game, despite the fact that the game is incredibly short, only being about ~45 minutes long.
There was even a Halloween event where the developers placed 10 pumpkins around the game for you to find for a surprise, so it’s obvious that the developers actually cared about the game that they were making, even if was a low budget game that got lost under the torrential pour of unknown games on Steam.
My only real complaint is that the game runs a bit sluggish for what it is. There are a lot of other games out there done by small studios (and I mean small) that look better and run smoother than this game. I don’t expect a graphical powerhouse out of such a small project, but It would nice if it the game was at least hitting 60 FPS.
Is Oakwood going to win any “Game of the Year” awards? No. But then again, it’s definitely a step up over the glut of cheap asset flips. At least Oakwood has some personality. If anything, this game will end up being cheap during a Steam sale, and probably be worth picking up for whatever price it’s on sale for.
You are going up to Oakwood, an abandoned campground, to meet up with your friends and spend the weekend having fun. Arriving late, you find your friends campsite abandoned, clothes and items strewn across the ground. As you head a scream in the distance, you run to find out what happened to them, and you soon find yourself trying to escape from the deadliest creatures from history.
I don’t quite know why you would go to an abandoned campground of all places to camp when there are probably a lot of other nicer places to camp with a lot of similar activities, but I guess that wouldn’t be as interesting as going to an abandoned place where no body would find you.
While the game has you spend most if walking through the dark with a flashlight, thankfully it doesn’t include needing to collect batteries for your flashlight like a lot of these games have. At some point, you move over to Night Vision Goggles, but that’s almost immediately after your flashlight breaks.
Even though the game doesn’t quite have the budget to make the visuals live up to it’s ambition, the game tries it’s hardest to add a few bits here and there to make it seem as creepy as possible. Outside of the few jump scares that a lot of horror games have, you can hear the occasional scream in the distance or see a pool of blood that leads off into the distance as one of your friends was dragged of, there is enough to keep this game afloat in terms of scares. There’s even a few sections where you have to run through long grass as dinosaurs run passed you out of the corner of your eye. Sure, it’s all predictable, but it’s more effort than some other bigger games have put in.
It does have notes that you can pick up throughout the game, but they all make sense as to why they’re there, with most of the notes done by your friends located at where their camp site is, and the ones featuring the history of the park located in draws in the campground building. It adds a bit of flavor to an otherwise forgettable short horror game.
Throughout the game, there are collectable totems, and if you collect all of them through one of your playthroughs, there is a slightly out of the way door you can find and open. I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s a nice little addition that adds some replayability and variety to the game, despite the fact that the game is incredibly short, only being about ~45 minutes long.
There was even a Halloween event where the developers placed 10 pumpkins around the game for you to find for a surprise, so it’s obvious that the developers actually cared about the game that they were making, even if was a low budget game that got lost under the torrential pour of unknown games on Steam.
My only real complaint is that the game runs a bit sluggish for what it is. There are a lot of other games out there done by small studios (and I mean small) that look better and run smoother than this game. I don’t expect a graphical powerhouse out of such a small project, but It would nice if it the game was at least hitting 60 FPS.
Is Oakwood going to win any “Game of the Year” awards? No. But then again, it’s definitely a step up over the glut of cheap asset flips. At least Oakwood has some personality. If anything, this game will end up being cheap during a Steam sale, and probably be worth picking up for whatever price it’s on sale for.