Think back to that first encounter with the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation. The slow reveal as the ultimate apex predator plops out of the nearest vent and stands up just as you take refuge under the nearest desk. Then comes the tail. Oh god, the tail. The way it slinks over the desk that separates you from certain death.
Now think back to that first encounter and imagine if it was so bugged that the xeno got stuck dropping into the room. How much tension would be lost if you could rise from beneath the desk and stroll up to the beast while it twitches, kiss it right on its little mouth and skip off unharmed?
I wish I could say my first meeting with the T-rex in Wilderdark was just a one off. It could have just been unlucky that the terrible lizard somehow got wedged in a tree moments after orchestral strings alerted me to its presence. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just unlucky.
Team Junkfish already delayed this first-person survival horror by a week to get in some last-minute polish. There’s the foundation of a fun game here, but it’s still vastly undercooked, buggy, and clunky enough that it consistently makes things harder than they need to be for the player.
Wilderdark is a slow-moving game that arms you with a camera, a data scanner, and later on, rudimentary equipment for climbing and breathing underwater. It wants you to creep while you document the flora and fauna of its parasitic island that is not only feeding on its wildlife, but also slowly ingesting the expeditions who were there before you.
Some of its vistas are beautiful, with gigantic plants and strange organisms bursting with colour against the gloomy, Returnal-like hue. It wants the dinosaurs to feel like a big deal. They are the dominant life force, the movement in the dark, and your main danger. But further bugs, even after witnessing the tree-rannosaurus, turned my experience into one of frustration rather than palpable horror.
Case in point: an early meeting with a herd of triceratops was ruined by one getting jammed onto an abandoned tent. I was initially enjoying monitoring their route and watching them walk in formation to see where I could safely observe from. It’s off-putting to then see the helpless body of one stuttering with sadness, brought on by accidentally providing the perfect photo opportunity for my research. Or at least, it would have, if Wilderdark’s photo framing system made any sense.
Now, I’m not a professional photographer. One would expect a photo that clearly has a specimen lined up, centred, and fully viewable is more useful than one that was hastily taken from afar that barely even catches the intended subject.
Yet, Wilderdark’s perimeters are unclear, meaning beautiful photos that you’d tag the dino in on Instagram are often marked as worthless when submitting to the main camp’s research terminal. Similarly, downright bad photos are often marked as well-framed and suitable for inspection.
It quickly renders a key gameplay feature to be pretty pointless, even if the camera’s flash function cleverly opens up parts of the island, and stuns onrushing dinosaurs that are spooked by your presence.
Your scanner also provides a useful log of the strange plants and materials harbouring in the wilderness, but its extremely limited battery runs out so quickly that early parts of the game are defined by running back to camp to get more juice.
Wilderdark immediately throws multiple open objectives at you. This allows for exploration to happen naturally – you can spot a route and head that way if you fancy. It does mean you’ll cover the same areas a lot, though, especially as vital notes, gear and collectibles are easy to miss against the dark greens of the jungle that is only accented by the bursts of pinky purple that signal the parasite.
The game’s map is useful for outlining where important items are, even if it’s annoying having to stop and open it up each time you want to check a direction.
By far the island’s most exciting sections stem from its underground cave network, which is accessible once you’ve found the breathing apparatus. It’s here that Wilderdark feels like an alien world that’s worth exploring, with hidden secrets that are exciting to unravel.
There’s an important caveat to add to that, though. It’s easy to get caught in a near-instant-kill loop that removes any of the game’s subtleties, replacing them with the kind of frustration that will force players to move on to something new.
Initially, each death infects your character a little more, with three builds of parasite taking over if your health reaches zero. You resurrect where you are, meaning the long journey isn’t for nothing. However, die after the third parasite symbol appears and you become extremely vulnerable, with further deaths forcing you back to the last major save.
Although antidotes can be concocted, they are limited, leading to the potential situation I got stuck in after a little cave exploration that led to a second area.
Upon returning back, three different types of dinosaur lurked outside where I needed to exit to get back to the main camp. If I outran the triceratops, the velociraptors caught up to me. If I waited for them to pass, a T-Rex stomped close (out of the tree, this time). Not only did I have to keep replaying it until I found a path that worked, I had to keep picking up the collectibles I lost when dying.
I eventually broke through, and snorted down some meds for a little respite. Minutes later, I was back to being fully riddled with the island’s infection, after being forced to jump to my death because my climbing rope wouldn’t let me descend down it after use. I assumed the rope issue was a bug, but not once did I manage to slide down it across any of Wilderdark’s cliff sections.
There’s plenty of those annoyances in this game, particularly if you’re playing on a controller. Choosing photos for inspection and combining ingredients to make materials is weirdly clumsy. While the logbook is useful, the map portion kept zooming out so far that I had to plug in a mouse to find it again. It was stuck like that every time I used it after the first couple of hours.
It’s in these moments that I wish Team Junkfish had given themselves more time to get things right.
Some players will find enjoyment in Wilderdark; it tells an intriguing story, occasionally looks gorgeous and is straightforward enough to race through. However, it’s a problem that the game would likely improve without the dinosaurs, which ironically, seem to have taken the notion of being infected with a killer bug far too literally.
