Dark Forest

Dark Forest on itch.io

In this text-based digital supernatural horror game, you play as a 15-year-old at a summer resort near Mount Katahdin, Maine, who discovers a monster in the forest that surrounds the property and must defeat it or die trying. This game was inspired by Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and the tabletop role-playing game system Monster of the Week, and is built around the idea of the illusion of choice, as well as themes of ambition, desperation, and consumption, which feature heavily in my work.

Dark Forest was a personal project that I worked on from April to September of 2022. I was the sole writer and programmer, and used Twine as my platform to create a game of branching narratives. I wanted to give the player freedom of choice at some points, but the illusion of choice at others, so many of the narrative branches lead into each other. At the end of the day, the protagonist of this game is a teenager, and has never encountered the supernatural before, so I wanted to make the player feel that dread of being powerless in a situation where something far older and far stronger than you is in your way, and I wanted to convey the feeling that in order to beat something like that, or at the very least, survive it, the character (and thus the player) would have to be smart, and not just rely on dumb luck when everything is at stake.