Darkwood / YMMV - TV Tropes

Demonic Spiders:
- Red Chompers. They're fast, aggressive, hit like a runaway freight train, capable of pulling off fake charges while also evading mistimed melee strikes, and tough enough to take the better half of a pistol magazine to kill. While they’re rare and only found in certain side quests within the first two areas (the “Bride of the Wedding” in the Dry Meadow and the Mayor’s pet in the Village), they become a common enemy once you reach the Old Woods. In fact, at that point certain areas and beyond can be swarming with them. It’s recommended you stockpile trap construction material like scrap metal and bottles before reaching the Old Woods because your situation gets worse once it’s nighttime.
- Banshees. They’re a walking Brown Note Being that appear as early as the Silent Woods, yet become common once you reach the Old Woods and even appear as regular enemies in the Swamp (unlike the previous mentioned hideouts where they only attack at night). They mess with your game via Interface Screw if one is near you. If one does find you and both of you make eye contact (or it touches you), they scream out loud and knock all your lights out with the exception of lit flares (which can be fatal if the Shadows night event is active while you’re out of flares). Afterwards, they burn up and spawn four Banshee Babies who gang up on you in the dark. You cannot prevent the process by stealthily killing Banshees since they’ll scream regardless and neither the self-terminating mommy nor her babies drop any items when killed. You cannot even scare them off with your “Scream” ability nor hide from them with “Chameleon” if you unlocked it/them. All you do is burn resources and health trying to kill these monstrosities without any reward to be had, plus having no lights to work with outside of items like flares makes fighting other monsters far more dangerous.
- There are three enemies introduced in the Swamp that will terrorize your time there.
  - The Swampers, black mutated alligator-like creatures that lurk in deep waters. They deal massive damage and can spit at you which leaves behind a trap similar to the moving vines traps or chain traps. This means you're a sitting duck if you get stuck in it and god help you if you're near water, for you will have even less mobility while stuck to it. They also move faster in the water, being able to ambush you without warning if you don’t listen to their bubbling water noise cue before they attack.
  - The Human Spiders. These beings of amalgamated human corpses are fast, relentless, and persistent predators. While in view they're rather slow, but once you take your eyes off them they become some of the fastest things in the game, so you’ll have no choice but to fight one when it knows you’re there until one of you is dead. It also has the ability to self-replicate by tossing off a chunk of their torso that'll grow into a new, yet less healthy, Human Spider. This means a one-on-one fight can soon become a three-on-one if you fail to kill the original quickly.
  - Lastly, there's the Centipedes, horrific insects inhabiting human corpses that can burrow underground along with their “puppet.” These things are able to dodge and jump around with abandon, attack at range by throwing debris at you, and while they're fragile they hit very hard; their persistent attacks can make fighting them a real pain in melee. Guns can make quick work of them with good aim, but their fast, erratic movement can make this easier said then done. They even have their own night event, for one can burrow under the Protagonist to ambush unaware players.
Difficulty Spike:
- The transition from the Silent Forest to the Old Woods is nothing short of brutal. Red Chompers become a common enemy, the Hideout is much harder to secure and the only part of it made safe by the gas is inside the building's outer walls. You'll also get nightly intruders way more often, which includes the Chompers (who can break barricades much more easily and quickly than Huge Dogs) and Banshees (that can now spawn without the telltale overhead crows; the only cue is the change in ambience). Unless you've practiced melee combat to exhaustion, it's best to spend your Reputation on ammunition and the crafting ingredients for Molotovs.
- Moving from the Old Woods to the Swamp is even worse. To start with, you have to lug everything you want to keep yourself – the Bike Man doesn't reach the Swamp. Anything you leave in the workbenches of the other hideouts is permanently lost. There's water everywhere and no continuous road to save stamina, so going anywhere is a stamina-draining slog that limits how much you can explore and loot in one day. You can be ambushed at any time by all of the Demonic Spiders mentioned above, and they frequently pop up at night to say "die", and that is when a Banshee doesn't pop up when the Shadows are running amok. Speaking of nighttime, the Swamp is exceptionally stingy with wood for barricades outside of the Sawmill location. And the kicker? The whole Swamp, easily the biggest area of the game^note, does not feature any Time Freeze locations – the moment you step out of the Hideout in the morning, time ticks on relentlessly. The only upsides are that the Hideout is not as hard to secure as the Old Woods one^note and ammo for guns is abundant, so you'll hardly be forced to engage in ill-advised melee combat.
Jerkass Woobie:
- The protagonist is a merciless, cruel individual with a disdain for basically everyone around him, and he's able to commit some seriously brutal actions throughout the story for his own personal gain. That being said, he's a mutated, possibly mentally unwell individual stuck in an absolute hell on earth, and the multitude of flashbacks throughout the game imply that he had a loving home life with his family; much of what he does is simply in an attempt to get back home. The fact that, no matter what you do, the protagonist never truly comes home is deeply depressing.
- Same goes with the Villagers, who treat you like absolute dirt, but themselves are on the verge of collapsing, and depending on your actions they can all go savage or get slaughtered to the last person.
Most Wonderful Sound: The slowly rising orchestral piece that plays whenever dawn is about to break, signalling at least a momentary reprieve.
Nightmare Fuel: Well, it is a horror game.
- The general atmosphere. Music is rare, with most of what you hear being ambient sounds and the noises hostile creatures make. The woods are, well, dark, with anything not in your cone of vision being greyed out. And due to your inability to see what's outside that cone of vision, you never know if there's some horrible creature right outside it, leaving you on edge.
- The Sow, found in the Pig Shed. A giant, immobile pig that constantly screeches and groans, flailing its razor-sharp limbs and injuring the player should they get too close. It's simultaneously horrifying and tragic.
- Various events can happen at nighttime aside from monsters trying to get in, including the lights going out (which is bad news after your first level up railroads you into the negative trait that makes being in the dark at night extremely dangerous), knocking at the door, lights shining outside...
Player Punch: The game holds nothing back in how the consequences of your actions can ruin everyone's lives. In particular, helping the Wolfman in Chapter 1 by giving him the “Key Covered in Chicken Feces” results in him eating the woman alive in a perverse parody of lovemaking, which you only see the aftermath of. It's not pretty. An even worse part is finding out in some endings that if you let the Pretty Lady live by not giving the Wolfman the key, she ends up being a cannibalistic monster due to the infections she suffered from the plague, meaning even your Jerkass moves can have less negative impact on the people living in the woods compared to choosing more morally outstanding choices.
Popular with Furries: Naturally the Wolfman is the one character that has taken the interest of the Furry Fandom.
Self-Imposed Challenge: It wouldn’t be a Souls-like game without a community who finds new and interesting ways to make an already hard game even harder. A few ones are listed below:
- Gritty Realism: Based on the Dungeons & Dragons campaign mode, where realism applies to items that you carry both on hand (your hot bar) and your inventory in terms of weight and size. For instance a tractor wheel is so large you wouldn’t be able to hold/use anything else in your hands like a gun or torch while holding one; holding a gas can would prevent you from using anything requiring two hands under normal circumstances (e.g. shotgun); etc. You must prepare your gear the same way you would realistically in real life, such as being able to sling a shotgun on your back while holding a gas can in one hand and a pistol in the other, and carrying too many heavy items would encumber you — thus you cannot sprint while doing so.
- No Gun Run: You can only use melee weapons and throwable weapons like knives and Molotov Cocktails to fight enemies.
  - Melee Only: Taking the above challenge one step further, you cannot use any ranged weapons whatsoever.
- No Level Ups: You cannot use the oven to cook food and gain new skills/passives.
  - For added challenge, gain one skill/passive to unlock the deadly “Shadows” night event so it’s active before you reach the Swamp, then never use said skill/passive you unlocked. Now the night is even deadlier than ever and you get no benefit from it.
- Speedrun: Complete the game as fast as possible.
  - For added difficulty, if you don’t beat the game within a pre-determined amount of days, you lose and must start over.
- 2xFore Expert: Use only the Board with Nails weapon.
- Trap Master: At night, you cannot use weapons and must rely on traps and your wits to deal with enemies. Matches and flares are the only items allowed to start gasoline on fire.
That One Level:
- The Old Woods are a true Difficulty Spike. Red Chompers and Huge Dogs roam the place constantly, there's no equipment upgrades to speak of like when you go from the Dry Meadow to the Silent Forest, and the hideout has more holes than a sieve, making nights exceptionally difficult to manage. Some consider hunkering down at nighttime even more difficult here than the Swamp, mostly due to having only one movable lamp and several open areas in the hideout that enemies can walk through with ease.
- The Swamp is utter hell to navigate, as it's a colossal area^note filled with swamp water that slows you down, poisonous mushrooms galore, and a large amount of tough enemies (including the three above-mentioned Demonic Spiders), which can have Shadow Armor on them. There are no separate major locations where the In-Universe Game Clock freezes, so you can only visit one location per day and that's with a carefully-designed schedule. Also, gasoline and wood are at a premium and a must pickup whenever found, and thanks to the twisting land paths and the water, it's a slog to carry supplies back to the hideout. Fortunately, ammunition for firearms is absurdly easy to find there, the hideout is more easily defensible than the Old Woods one, and nightly invaders aren't nearly as relentless.

YMMV / Darkwood

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