There’s a tendency among gamers to attribute good combat to complicated attack combos that require a lot of practice to execute properly, complex and varied enemies that test the player’s skills and etcetera.

Darkwood has these two attributes, but in a completely different shape. The main character’s main attack is slow, weighty, and reliant on stamina, while enemies have a predictable but powerful attack that will stagger the player if they get hit, and to top it all off there’s the weapon durability system, meaning that even if you defeat a enemy, it will come at the cost of your precious weapon, and as it increasingly becomes clear throughout the game’s length, combat is not always the best option, if anything the game gives you enough tools that serve to avoid combat altogether, and in general engaging in battles are only advised in situations where your only choice is to fight.

Yes, you heard me right, choice.

Because combat is merely a branch of a larger tree, one that reveals Darkwood’s true nature.

It’s a game all about choices and its consequences. Everything the player does is a choice, unconscious or not, and, however minor they seem at the time, will have consequences that may be with you for the rest of the game, and because of that, time becomes a very precious resource, one that the player must always pay attention to, as daytime becomes both the time to move further towards escaping the accursed forest and a preparation phase for whatever strange happening occur at night, and coming into the dawn of the night prepared to survive and fend off against whatever attempts to invade your settlement is rewarded, but one could also use daytime to progress through the tasks logged in your journal at the cost of having a harder time fending off against the abominations at night. And every one action, big or small, done at daytime may determine the rest of the day’s length, using healing items earlier on the day means you’ll have to be more careful at dodging enemies during the night, and missing an attack will lead you to take a good amount of damage, which may lead you to using that one healing item that would’ve been so useful later on, or having to carry healing items and weapons for future combat encounters mean you’ll have to sacrifice carrying resources and vice-versa, and even how you choose your abilities at the oven may change how you approach the game, even a choice between giving a key to the Wolfman or the Musician exists to further drive that point home.

But no other moment accentuate this better than when you are about to leave the forest behind to advance into the swamp, while sacrificing every item that isn’t in your inventory, you’ll have to stop and think about what items would be useful to carry into a potentially more hostile environment than the previous one, and it’s at the swamp where your fate will be determined from that points onwards, and choices you made in the past may (and will) come back to bite you in the ass and will pull the rug out of under you if you played your cards poorly by that point.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but all of this above is what truly makes Darkwood scary. Don’t get me wrong, the atmosphere is incredibly haunting and oppressive, and its horrifyingly unnerving art style presenting a dark forest where the trees meet beings beyond our comprehension, and even the “friendly” denizens look rotten and and almost falling apart, but the terror Darkwood creates on the player is genuinely effective not simply because of the atmosphere, but because that atmosphere is marred into a similarly oppressive and deliberately brutal gameplay loop. It’s Don’t Starve on steroids, it’s Zdzislaw Beksinski meets Shrek and Hoodwinked Robert Eggers, it’s the horror game every other horror game wishes it was.

The forest is unrelentingly cruel, and will fucking eat you alive if you let your guard down, so please, respect the woods.