#chomper darkwood

[lizrdkix]

soo ummm um uh how do we feel abt banshee homura and chomper madoka..

[sketchygabz]

BABE WAKE UP DARKWOOD IS TRENDING AGAIN

[tanblaque]

Hello! First of all, I love your artwork and animations you made currently about OFF. Second, while I was in youtube I've found an animation from Darkwood, recently I've played this game (I enjoyed it that played for many hours to understand the dinamics) and when you made that animation it's was like gem you've spent to make the scenes where the stranger's tension to be chased by the chomper was neat!!

Thanks! <3

YES! I love Darkwood so much!!! And I glad you like that animation <3 Such an underappreciated game!

[chubbygrape]

**spoilers on the village/musician/well

Man i finally came across the Musician today - he was so so sweet i felt so bad reading his dialogue. Also i read somewhere he's technically been alive the whole duration of the events of darkwood? literally shattered the my heart. He's literally known nothing else but this bullshit, I cant do this

I talk to him and he apologises cause he 'knows' his violin sounds bad?? - U SWEET BABY

And then he was like-- 'oh do i bore you' I would LITERALLY die for you RN

I say that, but I am a HYPOCRITE cause by the time i interacted him i had scoped the entire village so i had the key so i could just hand it to him but i SUUUCkkkkk

I'm fully committed to giving it to the wolfman (pls respect my decisions cause i dont) but this made it so hard now, like damn we cant support shady characters in peace anymore?? theres got to be some sickly kid on top of it ruining everything??

Also - BIG SPOILERS - but I read somewhere that if i gave the key to him then the pretty lady would literally devour him and fuck thaaaatttt - maybe if i just give it to wolf hell gobble down his lady and the little snot with get away idk i have no idea ok

Speaking of cute kids, the WELL??? And the childs drawings on the ground??? and the baby red chomper???

I can't deal with innocent children in a harsh world ok pls chain me away.

[monochromatictoad]

🚩 🧮 🔖 for the dark selfship asks, and any f/onxou wnat!

- @aro-simp

I'm gonna do this one for my Darkwood ship!

🚩 What makes your selfship ‘dark’? Is it the dynamic? The way they met? A specific element of the relationship?

So, a number of things make Bugperson/The Trader/Stranger dark. First, the Stranger doesn't have a set personality, but he is very morally questionable. Especially once you learn what Red Chompers actually are 🙂 However, the more he interacts with others, the worst many of their fates become 🙂 also because it's hinted that The Stranger killed the Trader in chapter 2, though you never actually see it. So it really depends on his actions in Chapter 1 that affects the Bugperson idea of him. Also because Bugperson constantly misgenders The Stranger, because they struggle to communicate to each other, both are mute because of the Forest, but neither one speaks sign language 😔

🧮 If one of you has more power in the relationship, is there anything the other person does to undermine that power? How does the more powerful person feel about that?

Mmm... The Bugperson and Trader are physically the strongest between the three, but they can't make the injections the Stranger uses to mutate himself further. These injections make him hallucinate horribly, and is possibly the reason the Trader is found decapitated in Chapter 2. It's a strange power dynamic, because in the end, the Bugperson doesn't care as long as the Nest isn't bothered by anyone.

🔖 If your ideal fanfiction existed about you and your f/o, what would the AO3 tags look like?

Dark themes, gore, major character(s) death, Hallucinations, bugs, guns, drug use(?), morally grey characters, cannibalism, unhappy ending(s), murder, fire, self mutilation, selfcest,

[sockeyesoren]

bro the tension during Darkwood's nights- Like I'm on day 2 in the Dry Meadow nothing's going to get me except maybe a dog or one of those tree chompers yet I'm so stressed

[gaygamesstarringmary]

Atomic Wasteland, Sentient Forest, Alien Ocean

‘Fuck You’ Graffitied Across the Wall

My first M-rated game was Fallout 3. I cried when I finished that game. Not because the game was particularly sad, but because I knew I could never go back and play that game again. 

After years of begging for a PS4, my parents got me a PS3. I wanted Fallout 4 but it wasn’t compatible with the PS3, so I settled for Fallout 3. The graphics sucked, even for 2016.

And my mom. She wasn’t sure how graphic this game was, so she watched me play it. Of course, she watched the worst part. My player character entered a building I knew was filled with raiders- post-apocalyptic baddies. But I didn’t know they had littered the floor with mines.

My character exploded into a million little pieces. The camera focused on one piece in particular as the chunk rolled down the stairs. There, at the bottom of the stars, written in blood: FUCK YOU.

My mother was shocked. Never had she been so repulsed in her entire life. And just as she’d given me the game, she took it away.

I begged. And begged. And pleaded. After a few days of my nonstop pleading, and my verbal promise that I would never actually kill anyone in real life (I’m the type of person to spare the scariest of spiders), my mom returned the game to me, albeit begrudgingly.

I recently played Fallout: New Vegas, and I never learn. Never look at the floor. I never even think that mines might be on my path. Now, though, my mom watches me play with glee. She is horrified, yes, but only because I’m so goddamn bad.

2. The Sun Sets; I’m Completely Fucked

The setting sun casts its orange light on the forest. Soon this crooked forest will consume everything. Already, it’s taken highways and villages for its own. In these villages, infected humans lay dying. Some infected humans keep their sanity, but not their human image. And some still lose both mind and body to the forest. The player character, a human who has managed to keep his sanity and his self despite the forest’s universal plague, sprints home. There, he pulls a dresser in front of one of the doors, starts the generator, and hides in a corner gripping tightly his rifle. 

When the sun sets, the infected come. First, they knock on doors. They peep through windows. Then they grow more violent. They tear down barricades and search the homes for the man inside.

Darkwood is a hit-or-miss game for most. I love it through and through. The infected forest is beautiful. The infected people, not so much, but I enjoy screaming and running from them as fast as my poor player character can.

I fell in love with this game during the first night I played. A knocking at my door startled me, but I continued hiding in my corner, and, eventually, whoever was knocking roamed away. The lore of the game is wonderful, as I discovered when I met the Wolf Man. The plague touched him so that he transformed into a bipedal wolf, with the appetite to boot. 

The monsters are horrifying. Knowing that they are- or were- people is worse. Chompers were the bane of my existence while I played this game, and I ran every time I saw one. They are infected people who split down the middle to their chests. This made room for a large mouth of teeth.

I have days worth of time invested into this game. 

But I cannot finish it.

I don’t want a repeat of Fallout 3 ever again, so I never finish games I really love. When I feel Darkwood’s end drawing near, I delete my save file and start anew.

3. Discovering I Have Thallassophobia

I love games, but I am not good at them. I have to play most shooters on easy because I have the aim of a drunk Stormtrooper. Subnautica is no different.

I love the ocean. Before Batman came along, it and mythology had been my hyper-fixations. I still know way too much about yeti crabs and other deep-sea life. While no longer a hyper fixation, the deep oceans are still fixations.

I want to live at the bottom of the ocean. I dream not of whale song, but of bone worms swaying in the current. Before I get started on the real oceans, though, let me introduce Subnatuica.

Subnautica is a first-person adventure game set on an alien planet made completely of water. Your goal is to get off the planet while avoiding being eaten by an apex predator along the way, or being picked off by those annoying little crabs. It focuses on adventure and base building, but I didn’t care about either of those.

I wanted to see the creatures. Specifically, the creatures in the deep dark. So, as soon as I had the necessary resources, I vowed, I would travel to the abyss and gather information on every lifeform there.

That never happened. Again, I’m awful at games. 

Worse, it wasn’t even an apex predator that kept killing me- or even those crabs. It was dehydration. Water was all around me, but not the drinkable kind. And I had no idea how to get water so I kept dying.

I gave up sooner rather than later and watched every Youtuber play Subnautica  I could. Despite having never been to the abyss myself, I have seen through others the creatures that live there, and they are just as strange and fascinating as the deep-sea animals in real life. 

Biolumenisent predators. Long-legged crabs. And sapient creatures that, unlike dolphins (who I fully believe to be as intelligent as humans, unfortunately) aren’t completely fucked up in the head.

And, again, watching the ending of this game, I cried.

[foxgirl87]

(darkwood anon) i'm afraid it's not terribly different from the in-game events; i just thought it was so unfair that he didn't get to become a big scary monster 😭 and i love the design of the pretty lady, so i based his off her appearance, thinking that perhaps she is a "type" of monster with a specific set of mutations, similar to the chompers

so he's this huge blobby thing like she is. his eyes so deep-set in his face that his sockets appear empty, his nose a useful flap, his mouth a twisted gash across his face. he still has his hair and it's pretty much the only recognizable part of him along with what remains of his nose

this is some art i drew of him back in 2020: https://file.garden/ZQbq3KzuxT0Youxl/art/tumblr_poitl1llYo1xqm7w6o2_r5_1280.png

he is aggressive if left to his own devices and will actively hunt people down 💔 he's also huge, being slightly bigger than the pretty lady

WHERE ARE HIS CLOTHES 😨😨😨😨😨 IS HE BUTT NAKED OUT THERE??? 😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨

Anyways I like thisj AU 💞💞 The Fox would definitely take care of him in this state 💞💞💞💞

[wardzold]

Dreaming in the woods

I can’t really draw a comic and don’t want to spend too much time on this, just wanna draw the story out

[wiwiwline]

DAY 8!!!!111 TEETH. It’s a darkwood monster called RED CHOMPER and not among us things okay ?

[lizrdkix]

visit me in chomper city

[angrybatart]

One big Darkwood fanart dump. I was trying to fill the page with nothing but Darkwood stuff, but I see I missed a corner. I'll fill it later.

(Close-ups for a better look.)

The Wedding was one of the creepiest parts of the game (next to the corpse with the radio stuck in it during the Prologue). I knew about it, but didn't know how exactly it was all going to go down and am surprised I didn't get any nightmares or night terrors from it. Lol Favorite part so far, with my favorite variation of the Chompers. I loved how she still twirled/danced while trying to chew you to bits.

The Bride's dress was half-assed. I don't know how to do dresses...

Had to draw the Banshee again. They and the Chompers are my favorite enemies, though I never look forward to them breaking into the hideouts at night. I've yet to survive an invasion by them...

When I realized that Banshees have bird feet, this is what popped into my head.

Here she comes!

Seconds Til Disaster

Yours truly is dumb, and thought it would be a GREAT IDEA to smack the random body laying on the bridge leading to the Old Woods. So my first encounter with a Chomper went as well as you'd expect it to.

The Trader, trying to learn how to make a heart with his hands. Because everybody loves him! (I hope...)

And, finally, a random quick Banshee Baby sketch. I hate these things...

Also, I had to start over in this game because I'm dumb and had sold ALL of the shotgun shells I found because I didn't think I needed them. But then I got to the Old Woods and realized the handgun isn't as useful when you had a Red Chomper and a Huge Dog coming after you at the same time. Because I'm dumb...

[whaleofatjme1920]

💐 BOUQUET - create a bouqet for them! what do those flowers mean? are any of the flowers their particular favourite?

🌺 HIBISCUS - do they have any allergies?

🍁 MAPLE LEAF - what is their favourite season? why?

🍃 FALLING LEAF - do they enjoy being in nature? what is their favourite outdoor activity?

☀️ SUN - are they a morning person? what is the first thing they do in the morning?

🍀 CLOVER - do they believe in luck? are they lucky?

For you darkwood ocs

Kacper

Bouquet: Blue bells, white orchids, yellow cone flowers, cattails, wavy marshwort, other common plants found within the swamp. No significance! Kacper just really loves the swamp!

Hibiscus: he's like weirdly allergic to bees and can't come near Dorota's cottage and garden because she's like a natural bee magnet.

Maple Leaf: I'd say that Kasper really loves autumn, but not like, deep autumn. That odd bridging between summer and autumn, the transition, like September? That's when he's happiest. Kacper associates it with good feelings and makes a lot of his trading deals around this time.

Falling Leaf: He loves being out in nature, it's why his title is "The Wanderer". He wears a cape of moss and generally has a big love for the world around him. Part of the reason he left his home was to wander the woods. He hates staying in!

Sun: He's 100% a nocturnal. It's just how he works the best! He likes the swamplands the best. However, he also likes to do dealings with the people in the village. So, if he's still up in the early hours of the morning, he'll stay up to trade with them and then checks out for the day.

Clover: The only time he's ever considered himself truly lucky was when he just lost an eye to a red chomper, not his life. Other than that, he's pretty lucky with his dealings. Though sometimes, he's unlucky enough to have to talk to the Wolfman and cross paths with him even though they're on amiable terms.

Dorota

Bouquet

Any wild flowers, violets, chickaree, baby's breath, sweet pea, pansies, lots and lots of herbs! Dorota doesn't actually like flowers, she prefers herbs like oregano, mugwort, mint, rosemary, etc.

Hibiscus

None that she's aware of! Maybe the Wolfman's bullshit.

Maple Leaf

She's a big fan of spring due to her beliefs. Dorota is a Slavic pagan, and spring is very, very important to her. She does a lot of field blessings and adores the growth of her gardens.

Falling Leaf

She loves being out in nature too! But it has a limit. She can't actually stay outside for too long due to how the woods transformed her. If she stays out for too long, the trees will actually make her a part of them. So, she has a buffer time of staying in doors where the roots won't tangle around her.

Sun

She's a morning person. Loves getting up and seeing the sun rise, making coffee, attending to people who come to her cottage and sometimes heading out to the village.

Clover

She thinks she's lucky enough. That's all. She thinks she's a creator of her own luck and her deities help her when she asks. She always makes sure to pay back when she can.

[chubbygrape]

Re some of the names in Darkwood (*silent forest spoilers)

Speaking as a non-Polish person so feel free to shoot me if im wrong, but Im a huge name nerd and was looking up the names from Darkwood and I noticed that few of the names end in '-ek'.

e.g. Piotrek, Janek, Stasiek, etc.

So apparently, when applied to first names (male), adding the suffix '-ek' is a way of softening the name, and indicating smallness or endearment/affection. Wont get into the historics, but it's 'tradition' that's believed to have originated from the Protoslavic period, and then formalised during Old Polish period (believe 'Janek' was recorded as a name around this time)

So, there's Piotr + '-ek' -> Piotrek

and, Jan + '-ek' -> Janek.

Stasiek is not as intuitive (*to an english speaker) - I believe it comes from Stanisław + '-ek'.

Janek is actually referred to as 'Mr Jan' by the Musician, which I had originally misinterpreted as the Musician shortening the name out of endearment??? So wrong lol. But anyways, the Musician's a child, so of course he wouldnt be using such diminutive terms, whereas the Chicken Lady, for example, is his older sister so there you have it.

___ Now this is interesting on its own, but what I found even more interesting is that the same suffix is applied to Antek's name, Antek being the Red Chomper owned by the Village Leader in Silent Forest.

The Chomper's actual name ought to be: Antoni + '-ek' = Antek.

Which i find very interesting. The Villagers are very polarising. I seriously wonder about Antek's true origins. Being he was used like a 'guardian', I am guessing that's where the 'endearment' is coming from, perhaps. We know they trapped the baby red chomper in the well, instead of killing it, so wonder if that's a way of ... training the red chompers? Maybe that had worked once on Antek? What I'm thinking is that perhaps Antek had once been a child as well at some point? Or perhaps he was just a grown man named Antek that then turned into a chomper, and thats that lol.

Anyways, I'll leave this here; found it v interesting though.

[nanogrem]

Moth doodles with some bonus Sully!

Mild body horror warning -

Maw, who prefers being called Moth, is a culinary student who works as a chef at Aucori’s restaurant!

It’s where she met her now girlfriend, Sullivan!

Her design is inspired by a Therizinosaurus and a Chomper from the game Darkwood! Her mechanics in a fight is basically the more damage she takes, the more damage she deals (aka the more/larger mouths). Moth is around 6’ 8 so she’s a pretty big monster, she’s a soft spoken and a big softy though. She has a love for coffee, cute things, and culinary arts! As far as soul traits go, I have yet to decide if she’d be aligned with Patience or Kindness.

Her visuals are still in development but I have her story finished already - yay!

That’s all for now, I’m enjoying making my weird little AU and rambling about it on the internet :>

[anheliotrope-old]

oldwoodsoldwoodsoldwoods

I survived two nights in the Old Woods hideout with permadeath in Darkwood. It's commonly considered to be the toughest hideout. It was incredibly tense! Though also easier than I was dreading it to be.

(For quick context, Darkwood is a top down action RPG horror game. It features timing-based combat, base defense and resource management.)

I never got there before. Well, I did get there on my run 2 years ago, but it looked so difficult I felt I had no energy left to deal with such a difficult location. I was streaming it to @lesimpleton but I forgot most of it because I was doing this to destress during the last 2-3 months of my thesis work.

Playing a really stressful game to destress from a really stressful ongoing activity - definitely a me thing.

(Didn’t really help memory retention either.)

The Old Woods hideout initially looks maze-like. Some walls are torn down, a passageway is blocked. It's just not a neat collection of rooms. It's something you have to get familiar with in order to navigate during attacks. When you get there, you're against the clock to barricade it and get everything ready, which makes it hard to properly map the area in your mind.

To mitigate that I planned a bit so that I'd reach the hideout during morning. Having time to figure out the layout helped a ton, because mobility is king.

At one point they made changes to the game to incentivize more mobile play rather than barricading a single room to the max:

Earthquakes move your stuff.

Poltergeists move your stuff.

Molotovs destroy your stuff.

Damaging lights spawn on top of you, prompting you to have to exit the room so that your photosensitive character doesn’t get cataracts and dies, since healthcare coverage is quite poor in rural Poland.

Black damaging substance spawns under you, again prompting you to leave immediately.

All of these events make it potentially perilous to have only one safe room. I've adopted a proactive but still defensive style (Ironically, I’ve also had only two earthquakes over a dozen nights).

I used a lot of traps and upon hearing a bear trap get triggered I would immediately seek out the enemy to finish them off while they were snared. I barricaded no doors whatsoever, not even the doors leading to the outside. This is so I can roam the entire hideout and kill enemies early.

The worst thing you can do is barricade the whole place or barricade in a way that creates chokepoints while you hide. The result is that enemies are stopped at the barricades and take time to destroy them, during which other enemies might spawn that also get siphoned into the chokepoint your barricades have created. Once the barricades get destroyed you now have to deal with multiple enemies at the same time and that’s always Really Bad in the darkest of woods.

Instead what you want to do is to have enemies come at you staggered. This is achieved with traps and asymmetric barricading. This also helps you feel more like a predator in your own territory rather than "aaaa I'm in a death trap". The place might be a maze, but now it’s your maze.

The thing I love most about this game is that it's not mechanically difficult, but it just requires a lot of cold blood.

At this stage in the game the best weapon you can have is the single shot shotgun. One shot kills a red chomper. You miss and you have a good chance of dying, red chompers are very fast, faster than you, and deal a lot of DPS. If you missed your shot, gaining another chance to hit will require a clear idea of what to do rather than having an "oh shit" moment. You need to know how you're going to escape.

The way weapons work in this game is that you have very poor accuracy upon aiming and need to continue aiming for 1-2 seconds. Aiming slows you down and reduces your cone of vision. Moving and shooting reduces accuracy, taking damage destroys it.

Successfully gunning down an enemy requires good timing with the shotgun and the pistol, but in different ways. Shotgun is all or nothing, on the other hand, the pistol requires several shots and your accuracy goes bad on every shot, requiring some time to reset. The enemy generally gets staggered on hit which helps, but you constantly have to be mindful of how fast you're shooting and your remaining space. Panicking and shooting faster or backstepping too early will kill you.

There was a moment in the first Old Woods night where a red chomper was breaking the outer door and I no longer had a trap there. I opened one of the inner doors for it and waited for it to enter and blasted it to hell.

It felt good to ignore normal hide and wait instincts - instincts that this game maliciously nurtures by giving you:

Limited light, including things that damage you in the dark without you being able to defend yourself.

Limited lives. 4 (+4 collectible) on Hard. Just one on Nightmare. Harsh in a game that takes 12-25 gameplay hours to complete for a normal run.

Time as an enemy and precious resource.

Pitifully low health, represented as two lonely bar segments, probably from a bygone alpha era where having segments made more visual sense due to being able to get more health.

A limited 90ish degree visibility cone. The limited visibility constantly makes you feel like you might be backstabbed at any moment and makes listening to sound incredibly important. And oh boy, the sounds in the game are definitely not relaxing.

After the night was over, the friend to whom I was streaming to, went afk and I could hear something like "jeez what was intense" in the distance. The stress of playing really leaked into the stress of just watching that unfold.

This game has lot of unknown in it due to the harsh death penalties. This element of "cold bloodedness" wouldn't even exist if you could repeatedly experiment with the enemy AI and figure out everything down to a T.

It would be completely overblown borderline chuunibyou to call it cold bloodedness at that point, it would just be succeeding at a basic mechanical trial. But the game gives you a strictly limited ability to experiment. You have a very rough idea of how things behave and you need work with that. In combination with the horror theme, it works very well to give you a feeling of fulfillment when you act with clarity.

This has opened my eyes a bit in terms of game design. Limiting experimentation is a valid method, if a very dangerous one, but it seems really necessary for horror games to not lose their tension.

I've noticed that games where I feel like I know everything but am just lacking a bit of mechanical skill get boring really fast, especially if that mechanical skill requires a lot of repetition to gain. Darkwood requires little repetition overall, but doesn't even give you that little amount you need, resulting in a pretty strong do-or-die feeling.

(This also makes me realize that games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld lose their “charge” very fast if you were able to explore a lot of them in a sandbox mode.)