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Wilderdark is a first-person stealth horror game from Team Junkfish, the Scotland-based studio behind Monstrum. It's set on an island full of dinosaurs, and you have a camera and a scanner but no weapons, so the only way to deal with them is to avoid them.
You play a field operative sent to investigate a crashed expedition and find out what happened to the previous team. A parasite has corrupted the dinosaurs and plants, and several earlier expeditions have disappeared, including one led by your parents. Your employer wants the previous team's research recovered, while the organisation behind it all is after immortality. It's an interesting setup, but the game never managed to hold my attention.
Story and gameplay
As soon as you crash, the game tells you to start scanning and photographing things, before it has had much chance to build up an atmosphere. Everything you scan or photograph goes into your codex. Both the scanner and camera run on batteries, so you have to return to camp to recharge them. You can rest there too, but that only restores your equipment and doesn't heal you. The camera is the more useful of the two, as its flash makes vines retract and opens up new areas. It's a decent mechanic, but the rest of the loop gets repetitive quickly, and after a while scanning and photographing everything starts to feel like a chore.
The setting is interesting enough, but the way the story is told doesn't do it any favours. You collect notes left behind by earlier expeditions, and completing your parents' work gives the research mechanics some purpose. However, the audio logs have no actual audio, so you end up reading transcripts of what should be recordings. That takes away from the atmosphere, especially when you're exploring an island that's supposed to be full of mystery.
With no weapons, you're supposed to rely on stealth to survive. The problem is that I never noticed noise making much of a difference. Running or climbing somewhere the dinosaurs can't follow was usually enough to get away, and even without climbing, you can easily outrun and kite them. The AI makes things worse. I stood face to face with a T-rex that just looked at me and did nothing, while a triceratops walked past as I shone my flashlight directly at it, more than once. The only thing that actually got me was an early scream that made me jump. But once I realised I didn't need stealth at all, a lot of the excitement was gone.
The game would be much more interesting if something on the island actually hunted you and knew where you were, a bit like in The Forest games. Instead, the dinosaurs mostly stay where they are, and there's very little sense that anything is actively looking for you. The parasite is supposed to be the main threat, but it never feels like one. You're left exploring a semi-open world without much pressure to keep moving or worry about what's around the next corner.
The island is made up of caves, swamps and volcanic areas, with a hub at the centre and several camps scattered around the map. It's meant to give you room to explore, but you can only go where the game lets you. White vines mark every surface you can climb, while anything unmarked is off limits. It makes exploration feel more restricted than it should, especially when the game gives you so little reason to wander off the main path in the first place.
The lack of direction was probably my biggest problem. The map isn't interactive and there are no markers, so it's often unclear where you're supposed to go. The game tells you to find something, and then you're left looking for it without much help. I don't mind working things out myself, but Wilderdark doesn't give you much to work with. There's also little reason to explore for the sake of it. Most of the lore is optional, and unless the story has already caught your attention, there's not much pulling you towards the next cave or any other destination. That's where I started losing interest.
The island looks good at first, with its dark atmosphere and dense foliage, but there's not much visual variety once you've spent a few hours exploring it. The initial impression wears off fairly quickly.
Performance, at least, was good on my PC, with a Ryzen 5 7600X, RTX 3070 Ti and 16 GB of RAM. I played with most settings on High, a 60 fps cap and Resolution Quality set to 80. It ran smoothly overall, and I didn't encounter any major issues.
Final thoughts
Wilderdark has an interesting setup, and the island looks the part at first. However, the story relies heavily on reading notes and transcripts, while the gameplay doesn't give you much reason to keep exploring. Stealth is also difficult to take seriously when the dinosaurs are so easy to escape and sometimes barely react to you. Aside from that, you spend a lot of time looking for things without knowing exactly where to go, and there's little incentive to explore beyond what the game asks of you.
I would have stayed longer if anything on the island had actually come looking for me. As it is, I can't see myself going back.
The Good
Gloomy atmosphere- Interesting premise
- Smooth performance
The Bad
Dinosaurs that are easy to escape and give up quickly- Unclear objectives
- An island that looks open but keeps you on set routes
- No real feeling of threat
