If your idea of a horror game is a first person nightmare filled with jump scares or a classic survival horror like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, Darkwood will surprise you.

Darkwood is a top-down horror game recently released by Acid Wizard Studio. It was in Early Access since 2014, so it had its cult of fans, but only in August it was fully released on Steam. The developers say they tried to take a new perspective in the survival horror genre, inspired by David Lynch, Fallout, Dark Souls and the slavic folklore. The result is interesting and creepy.

The big twist in Darkwood is that you control your character in an a top-down vision, but his line of sight is in first person. You can only see what is in front of you. There is a cone of light that represents your vision and everything that is outside of it is obscured. This way, you can’t see what’s behind you or even at your side. If you want to see your surroundings, you have to scroll the mouse to the back of your character, which takes time and you can’t do it while you run.

The aesthetics of the game are superb, creating an atmosphere of horror that increases as the game progresses. When it gets dark, the woods get really claustrophobic and your line of vision is diminished. You always have to pay attention to your surroundings, because enemies are dangerous and there’s no safe place inside the forest.

The most interesting aspect of Darkwood is the exploration. The woods are procedurally generated, but the content of the game isn’t. So, everytime you start a new game, you have a new forest to explore, but exploring is not easy. The map only shows landmarks like houses or strange trees and it marks the last landmark you visited, not your actual position. You have to use those landmarks to guess where you are in the area and find your way. When it starts to get dark and you have to go back to your safe house, it’s a run against time to find the right paths. This is a really interesting idea that more games should try.

The gameplay is pretty common for the most part of the game. During the day, you have to explore the woods, scavenge useful items for crafting and mushrooms that you can brew to level up. The controls are very clunky, but you’ll probably get the hang of them in a couple of hours.

When you stumble upon enemies, you have to run or fight them. The weapons are very difficult to find, so you have to save them for the really important encounters and run most of the time. In normal difficulties, there are not a lot of problems in dying, you’ll only lose some of your items, but you can pick them up later. In the harder difficulty, though, you die and it’s game over, so if you enjoy challenge (or if you are a very masochistic person), you might want to try the harder difficulty setting. At night, you have to head back to your hideout or you’ll die. There, you have to resist the hordes of invaders that will appear to assault you. You can barricade the doors and use traps to defend yourself, but you have to be careful to get through the night.

The story of Darkwood is probably its weakest part. The prologue sets you up as a mute wanderer that ended up in an endless strange forest. Your only objective is to find a way out, but how to do that? You’ll get some missions early on, but some time will pass before you start to understand more about your character and the world that surrounds him. Even at the end, the story is somewhat obtuse and hard to grasp. There’s some environmental storytelling that helps the narrative, but you’ll hardly understand it fully if you are not considerably interested in the backstory of the woods.

Darkwood is a very interesting, but clunky game. It has some really neat ideas like the pathfinding and the first person vision and very well done aesthetics, but at the same time, the gameplay is clunky and repetitive. The game also seems aimless and very poorly explained sometimes. The story is intriguing, but not very well told, which makes for an underwhelming experience. If you are up for something new, but far from perfect, Darkwood is a very interesting game.