If you find Darkwood too dark, perhaps you will like I Hate This Place, an isometric (is it, tho?) survival horror based on the comic book of the same name from Kyle Starks and Artyom Topilin. I Hate This Place is dark – it has hungry tentacle nests, antlered stalkers, and spiders of many sizes – but going by the trailer, at least, it’s nothing like as harrowing and hollowing as the Acid Wizard game. The colours are bright and splashy, the munsters, funky: think Stranger Things.
It occurs to me that we need a thematic darkness scale for ‘dark’ video games, perhaps comparable to ocean depth categorisation. I’d say Darkwood is right down there in the hadopelagic trenches. I Hate This Place? A denizen of the upper bathypelagic (Midnight) zone, so far. Here’s that trailer.
