Horrors and Barriers: The "Through the Woods" Demo Review

- by Ninja Ross, 17 August 2016

“Through the Woods” is an upcoming survival horror game from Norwegian developers Antagonist, about a mother running through haunted woods looking for her son. Title makes sense, so we're off to a good start with it.

​Antagonist recently released a demo of the game, which they plan to release on PC in October this year. The demo is short, but it does a good job of showing a fair few major elements of the full game.
 
You start off in some dark, haunted woods in Norway searching for the aforementioned son, who has been abducted by the mysterious “Old Erik.” You make your way through, encountering a small ruined Viking village, while the mother's narration brings you up to speed.

The place looks nice!

The narration is reactive, but it doesn't end up ruining the scary moments, which can sometimes be the case in video games. It's good to see the story mechanics working with the gameplay audio, rather than clashing and creating an irritating experience.
 
Through the Woods has a heavy focus on sound design, creating a lot of the atmosphere with audio. This leads to several tense moments, where you'll find yourself exploring the game world following (or running away from) strange noises coming from the darkest areas.
 
Exploration is rewarded with history of the village and its former inhabitants, but sometimes exploring makes creepy noises louder, which makes it a bit of a risky task, which unfortunately left me stuck behind a fence that I'd managed to climb/glitch my way over. I shouldn't have climbed over that, I was stuck for ages.
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Fucking fence.

Refusing to give up with the fence, I found that the atmosphere grew even more creepy and tense as the noises began to get more sinister and you start to see things that could ruin any safe feelings you had before.
 
The visuals are almost as impressive as the audio here. When I finally encountered a monster, I didn't even see it at first. I saw something shiny as I ran and was horrified to see what I thought was a tree standing up and giving me this real mean stare, like I'd just kicked its dog.
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This is the closest I got to it before panicking.

The use of light and shadows is great in this game, causing me to run away from nothing for most of the demo, before throwing that at me just in time, keeping me from getting relaxed or cocky.
 
But the aesthetics of the game look great, too. Everything is are suitably creepy, but the Norse architecture and the woods themselves are well done, full of details. Even the distant backgroounds are full of details.
 
While looking around does get you some cool context to the story and characters, there's a bit too much to check out with too little reward. But it's not a finished product and Antagonist seem like they're pretty skilled at creating atmosphere, so I can't see that being an issue with the full game.
 
Antagonist is putting together a real nice horror game here, but it still has a few issues to fix. It shouldn't be possible for idiots like myself to be able to climb over fences while trying to find monsters. People like me are why we have invisible barriers!
 
But even if they don't fix anything, it's still going to be a good game worth playing for the tense atmosphere. As it is now, Through the Woods is a smart, well made horror game with some slick sound design and impressive visuals. The monster designs are exactly what you'd expect from a horror inspired by Norse mythology and Norwegian folk tales and they're appropriately horrifying.

Everything about this demo inspires confidence in Antagonist. For such a new developer, they clearly know how to create a good horror experience. Look out for this in October on Steam!


Have you played the demo yet? What do you think about the fence issue? Will it be fixed? Also, did you like the demo? Let us know in the comments.

Tagged: video games, Reviews.

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