The top-down horror game Darkwood is one of the creepiest things I've played in a long time, which I really didn't expect—I mean, how scary can a game be if it doesn't immerse you directly into its world, right? But everything about it is wretched and pestilent, and its brilliant use of environmental audio cues has me constantly looking over my shoulder to see if there's something actually there. I'm not far enough into it to render any kind of final judgment, but I've made it through four nights and so far it's really good.

It's also not terribly expensive, going for $15/£12/€14, which I think is pretty reasonable for a niche indie game. But if that's out of your reach, you can play it anyway, because developer Acid Wizard Studio has uploaded the whole thing to The Pirate Bay.

"Steam lets you refund a game if you haven't played it for more than 2 hours, and as a developer we can see the reason why people refunded it. When we read the explanation from someone who wrote that he needed the refund because he didn't want his parents to be stressed out when seeing the bill at the end of the month... well, it made us feel quite bad," the studio explained on Imgur.

"So we decided to do something about it! If you don't have the money and want to play the game, we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood (1.0 hotfix 3), completely DRM-free. There's no catch, no added pirate hats for characters or anything like that. We have just one request: if you like Darkwood and want us to continue making games, consider buying it in the future, maybe on a sale, through Steam, GOG or Humble Store."

No catch, but one request: "Please, please, don't buy it through a key reselling site. By doing that, you're just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry."

I don't normally like to provide links to pirate sites, but since this torrent is being provided by the developer, here you go. If you haven't already seen it, you can check out some Darkwood gameplay in the launch trailer below. Acid Wizard also recently took part in a very lengthy AMA, "We're afraid to play horror games, so we quit our jobs and made on," on Reddit.