Many of us are a sucker for good, exploration-heavy survival horror titles, especially ones that field good plots and offer strange, dark worlds. Darkwood from Acid Wizard Studio fits that bill. Played from a top-down perspective, it will either seem like a clever throwback or a unique new interface depending on the age and experience of the player.

Darkwood exists with a constantly moving day and night cycle, and the game can almost be divided up into those two halves. While not completely safe by any means, the daytime offers ample opportunity to scavenge resources like gasoline for your generator and building materials for your barricades. At night, the woods turn deadly, and smart players will retreat into their fortified dwellings that they have hopefully tricked out with plenty of defenses and bright lights – which many of the evils of this world hate. You will spend many white-knuckle nights listening to SOMETHING walking around outside your fortress, scratching at the boarded-up windows or sniffing around your front door. Pray for daylight.

We tackle the dangers of Darkwood in this first playthrough, going through the tutorial and as many nights as we could survive before something inevitably came from the shadows for us. Follow along and see if Darkwood is your type of scary.