Through the Woods: Indie Horror Game from Oslo

This week we’ll get to a most promising Northern adventure game, with an unusual protagonist.

Through the Woods was conceived in 2009 and the development started in 2013. The team behind it is called Antagonist. It’s a small team, with 5 core members and a number of talented freelancers (including Jory Prum, who worked on Walking Dead series). Development on Through the Woods began as part of the teams’ final Bachelor thesis project. Great to see this project become a commercial product. They game got part of the funding on Kickstarted with about $40k. Plus they do have a publisher – a Russian company 1C, who’d been in this business for quite some time.

There’s a very interesting choice of protagonist going on in ‘Through the Woods’. You play as a mother, who’s searching through a forest for her missing son. It is said that her son has been kidnapped by a mysterious being called Old Erik. The female protagonist can’t do a lot of acrobatics and other stuff, but there’s a lot of exploration involved. The game looks absolutely beautiful. It’s got wonderful complicated environments with trees, rocks, strange spooky caves and all that other stuff. It looks seriously cool with beautiful lighting and amazing design. The lighting here is used in lots of ways to trick the player, to build deceptive and scary places for him to explore.

Through the Woods also has a huge part of its mechanics rooted in sound design. This game actually makes sound a more important part of the whole experience.

It’s hard to say if Through the Woods is destined to be a big hit. It’s old school horror game with 3d person camera, no VR and no multiplayer. What it has is that amazing theme, which takes you deep into the dark Norwegian horror, which may be quite an interesting place to check out.