The 2017 survival horror game Darkwood is really good and creepy as hell, an accomplishment that’s doubly impressive because it’s played from a fairly distant top-down perspective: There’s no up-close gore or monsters jump-scaring into your face, but hoobie-doobie is it intense. A sequel is in development, but it’s not being made by original developer Acid Wizard Studio, which went on hiatus in 2023; instead, it’s being developed by Pathologic squad Ice-Pick Lodge, which is honestly great—it’s a perfect matchup.
But one of the co-creators of Darkwood is up to something new, which also looks like it might be great: Brought to my attention by RPS, it’s called Hoarder, and it’s a cleaning sim, a bit like the Powerwash Simulator games.
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Well, maybe not entirely. As you can see from the trailer, it’s a dark, grim cleaning sim in which you’re not so much cleaning as excavating an old, ramshackle house packed to the ceiling with junk. It looks bad in there, although maybe not quite so awful when the sun comes up and you can properly get to work digging, scrubbing, hauling, dumping, listening to weird recordings, opening doors you maybe shouldn’t, discovering something in the basement, and, well, you know. Stuff like that.
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From the Steam page: The goal is simple: declutter a house abandoned by a hoarder. Start with the comfortable hand-holding of a job simulator: checklists, quest markers and clear goals. But beneath the trash lies a basement that defies geometry. As you descend, the game strips away this support system. No one is coming to save you.
What to make of all this? I’m not much of a horror game fan, really, but deep creepo games with very occasional jump scares have been worming their way into my psyche. Darkwood is brilliant, as I said, and I also recently finished the bite-sized Iron Lung, which I loved even though it made me scream like a schoolgirl. Creature Kitchen fits the bill, although it’s definitely more weird than horror (a raccoon scared the absolute hell out of me once, but that was my own fault) and also an utterly transfixing, beautiful experience (there’s a demo, try it), and the pre-release build of The Lift I played last year is similarly more spooky than scary, but offers a Hoarder-like focus on mechanical tasks. And I almost forgot Pacific Drive, another great twist on almost-scary gameplay that I adored.
What I’m saying here is that I may not be a horror fan but quite a few indie studios seem able to do things with the genre that are interesting enough that I put my aversion aside and dive in. Hoarder, I think, fits into that category too: I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it all the way through—I can already feel a small part of my brain saying “why are you even thinking about this?”—but yeah, I’m looking forward to giving it a shot.
Hoarder doesn’t have a release date yet but if you’re curious, you can chuck it onto your wishlist pile on Steam.
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