“ICE quoting Halo is surely as close as I’ll get to hell this week”, I said to myself earlier. “Hold my beer,” interjected Manor Lords publishers Hooded Horse, before diving into a flyblown burlap sack and fishing out the press release for Darkwood 2. Did you ever play Darkwood? It’s the survival horror game about being a horrible hermit in a horrible, horrible, top-down forest. It’s the game that persuaded Adam Smith to mercy-kill his dog. The new one is set in “the scorched deserts of a dying sea” that is slowly being engulfed by evil trees.
This dramatic change of setting isn’t even the most startling thing about the game. Nor is the fact that Hooded Horse, hitherto known for banger strategy games, are publishing it. No, the most surprising thing about Darkwood 2 is that it’s being developed by Ice-Pick Lodge, developers of Pathologic, with original Polish creators Acid Wizard monitoring the production from afar like lurking creatures in the underbrush.
Pathologic and Darkwood are, I think, neck and neck for the title of Video Game Most Likely To Actually Give You The Plague. Asking the makers of one to make a sequel to the other is like, I don’t know, putting Jack the Ripper in charge of the Manhattan Project. To top it all off, the key art reminds me of the main menu art for Soul Reaver. Truly, this is a videogame tailored to my tastes, though I do have some concerns about Ice-Pick Lodge’s ability to craft a top-down horror game and also, how they’re faring following the departure of their co-founder amid allegations of kidnapping.
Darkwood 2 is set amid the saline wreck of a real-life body of water, the Aral Sea. Lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, it used to be the third largest lake in the world at 68,000 square kilometres, but began shrinking in the 1960s after rivers were diverted to Soviet irrigation projects.
Today, it’s largely toxic dust, though there have been attempts to replenish the waters. Darkwood 2 takes place in the 1990s. Assuming the game sticks to real-life history, that would be following the abandonment of Soviet Russian efforts to restore the lake by way of a massive canal system, and during a phase of irrigation system building over in newly post-Soviet Uzbekistan. All that’s according to Wikipedia, anyway – if you happen to be a proper historian of the Aral Sea, I’d appreciate your input on the screenshots and trailer.
As for how it plays, Darkwood 2 looks to be treading squarely in its predecessor’s stinking, gore-filled bootprints. It’s a foetid real-time exploration and scavenging sim in which visibility is swallowed and splintered by encroaching trunks. It’s still about scraping together resources and fortifying a lair with barricades and traps, before the sun goes down and the real monsters come out. But there are new monsters to discover – hark at that giga-catfish in the footage – and there are “new reasons to pray for the morning light”. Set a few years later, the game seems to build on the events of Darkwood, but Hooded Horse assure us that it can be treated as a standalone story.
There are marshes to squelch through, meandering paths amid dunes, and deep waters to row over (I would probably row quite fast). There shall be no quest markers or waypoints, none of your modern cartographical frippery, only the madness and desperation of local humans fighting to keep the invading trunks at bay.
All this appetising misery notwithstanding, returning players may have misgivings about the departure of original developers Acid Wizard. The first game’s creators suspended operations indefinitely in 2022, after failing “to create a work environment that would not be destructive to our personal lives”. They had struggled to find an audience for their follow-up project, the jarringly upbeat football game Soccer Kids.
“Crafting the world of Darkwood was a very challenging and long journey for the team,” Acid Wizard co-founder Gustaw Stachaszewski comments in a press release for Darkwood 2. “After an experience like that, you become emotionally attached to your work. We know that the fans have been eagerly awaiting a continuation of Darkwood. For years, the idea of handing over our baby to another studio was something unthinkable for us. But, after it became evident that working together is not viable anymore, we decided that Darkwood should live on, even if not directly through our work.
“We’re genuinely excited to pass on the torch to Ice-Pick Lodge – creators whose work on Pathologic has inspired us for years,” Stachaszewski goes on. “The team at IPL really gets what makes Darkwood a unique experience. We believe they will not only honor its spirit but will create something truly exceptional. As for us, we’ll be in the background, making sure it stays true to the original vision.”
In the same release, Ice-Pick Lodge’s executive producer Alexander Souslov has some additional thoughts for people who might question the blend of developer and publisher here – again, Hooded Horse are better known for city-builders and 4X than spooks and squalor. “I believe the most interesting things are created when people with very different backgrounds work together on creative projects,” he observes. “Ice-Pick is known for its focus on narrative and on the design of semiotic systems. Hooded Horse, on the other hand, is renowned for its expertise in strategy. What kind of game could come from that?”
Ice-Pick Lodge have been on a complicated journey of their own, these past few years. The developers announced Pathologic 3 in October 2024. Due for release in January 2026, it includes story materials and other elements that were once supposed to be part of Pathologic 2. There was a certain amount of frission over this and the dropping of the original game’s open world elements, with our own Brendy (RPS in peace) commenting of one demo that it felt simultaneously designed for and designed to annoy returning Pathologic players.
Then, in March this year, founder Nikolay Dybowski suddenly left the studio after Pathologic players discovered that he had been accused of kidnapping and abuse, with allegations dating back to 2021. Former Ice-Pick developer Aleksey Luchin responded to these reports, branding Dybowski a “manipulative sociopath that is very good with words.” I’ve asked Hooded Horse and Ice-Pick if they’d like to offer any further comment on Dybowski’s departure. More positively, Ice-Pick Lodge were among the first Russian developers to speak out against their country’s invasion of Ukraine, telling social media followers that “a crime is being committed in our name. This is not only a crime against our friends. It is a crime against our dignity.”
There’s no release date yet for Darkwood 2, but you can read more on Steam and the Microsoft Store. You might also want to check out Alex Wiltshire’s old interview with Acid Wizard about how the original Darkwood “kills permadeath”. We never reviewed it, but Darkwood appears nonetheless on our list of the best horror games on PC. Here’s hoping Ice-Pick Lodge can do it justice.
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