It’s been too long since I last wrote about Acid Wizard Studio’s atmospheric indie horror game Darkwood. The ambitious, and often genuinely frightening, amalgam of numerous genres — part open-world roguelike, part horror adventure RPG– hasn’t stopped evolving since it released on Steam two years ago, though support for the game has slowed down lately.

The lack of updates is quickly addressed in a post on the developer’s blog, along with the added promise that “the next alpha will be the biggest yet!” Some highlights:

A new chapter
This means a new biome, locations, NPCs, enemies, items, objects and mechanics! Stuff that explodes, new uses for the shovel, rebuilding parts of your hideout and more!

The Swamp
There are unique dangers hiding beneath the surface of the many lakes littered around this biome. Traversing water will require a different approach than walking on solid ground. There is also a dense fog, which appears from time to time.

Vines and chains
You can expect to encounter various uses of this mechanic, including chain traps or things that crawl on the ground and try to catch and immobilise you.

New enemy behaviour
The enemies introduced in this update use more advanced tactics than the existing ones. This includes submerging underwater or underground, surrounding movement and sideways dodging, and reacting to your field of view.

Performance improvements
I’ve spent a lot of time on optimizing performance and memory usage. In particular, in previous versions of Darkwood, the lighting system could cause occasional stuttering due to memory allocation, but no more in the next alpha!

No word on when this update will be ready. Stay tuned.