80s-themed survival horror I Hate This Place is a gentler Darkwood based on a celebrated comic series

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.

In I Hate This Place – which has a demo on Steam – you play Elena, a grumpy teenage girl exploring the forests, bunkers and derelict townships of a “cursed land”. There’s a day-night cycle: when the sun is up, you explore, find resources and blueprints, craft gear, and set up shelters. When the sun is down, you try not to die.

The game’s humanoid mutants are blind, following the sound of your footsteps. As for the spiders, they range from swarms of baby arachnids in eggs to giant jumping varieties that pose as rocks. There’s also the requisite spider queen, who can tangle you in webs and impale you. All of these badniks are vulnerable to bullets, but I imagine it’s wiser to avoid them, for the most part.

What is Elena’s motivation, besides not getting squelched by a centaur or devoured by a tarantula? She is chasing the spectre of the Horned Man. That’ll be the dude who keeps doing Alan Wake 2-style cinematic stings at her while she’s rifling through cupboards, I expect. She also has a missing mother. This seems like a foundation for psychodrama, though I’m not expecting Remedy Entertainment levels of soap opera, going by the trailer. Elena sounds quite indifferent, for a girl at permanent risk of being skewered or torn in half. I’m not convinced she really does hate this place.

Anyway, the game is out remarkably soon – 29th January, in fact. The devs recently did a Reddit AMA if you want to hear more about difficulty modes, ammo scarcity and so forth.