![]() ![]() The forest is at once a land poisonous to its inhabitants but hospitable to the things that have grown to adapt to its fickle mutations. Every night he barricades himself in his house, arms himself and sits and waits as the beasts and madmen of the forest howl and smash themselves against his barricades.ĭarkwood is set in the 1980s – the decade that ended with much of the Eastern Bloc overthrowing their Communist governments – and Poland’s own politically flammable situation can be seen in the metaphor of the forest. Each day has the Stranger explore the forest in search of supplies, allies and a way out. The top-down game is as much about the horror of survival as it is about survival horror. Darkwood sees you play as the Stranger, a nameless protagonist who wakes up in an abandoned house in the center of an ever expanding forest filled with mutants and insane survivors. ![]() It helps that they’re set in Poland but time is just as important as setting. It’s games like Acid Wizard’s Darkwood and Bloober Team’s The Medium that feel closely connected to their country of origin. Where zombie game series Dead Island and Dying Light leaned harder into satire and themes of corporate malfeasance like Resident Evil did it’s easier to see the aforementioned games by Acid Wizard Studio and Bloober Team as successors to the psychological end of the scale as initially seen in Silent Hill. That’s where games like Darkwood, Layers of Fear, Observer and The Medium come in. Sometimes horror games care more about scaring you on a physical level rather than the psychological level a lot of today’s modern games try for. It’s easy enough to link the first Resident Evil in 1996 to the Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks in 1995 but that all falls apart once you try and dive deeper into it. It’s not necessarily true that a country’s history will actually have an impact on the kind of games that are produced there. Whether it’s parkour running from zombies in Dying Light, trying to escape a mutating forest in Darkwood or helping the souls of the dead move on in The Medium Poland had us covered. In the shadow of this leviathan other studios like Bloober Team, Acid Wizard Studio, Techland and The Farm 51 have been developing highly acclaimed and massively popular horror games at both an indie and AAA level. Some of the most popular RPGs of the last decade-plus such as The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 have come from Polish powerhouse CD Projekt Red. ![]() Poland is not exactly unknown when it comes to video game production. For the last decade deep in the dark, snowy forests and the haunted, cobbled streets of Poland there have been people hard at work shipping deeply disturbing games out into the world. There’s a dark corner of gaming however that’s only recently been discovered, like an abyssal sea creature or a cabin deep in the forest. ![]() Be it Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda, Call of Duty or Resident Evil America and Japan are key to the video games industry as we know it. Between them they have produced nearly all of the games that define what video games are. It’s often we consider America and Japan as the powerhouses and tastemakers when it comes to video games. ![]()
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