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Through the Woods Add comment

Sunday, November 02, 2025@November 02, 2025

At 12.28 a.m. on 2 November 2025 I finished Through the Woods, a third person Norwegian horror adventure developed by the indie studio Antagonist and published by 1C Publishing EU. The game was released in 2016 and maintains an intentionally restrained pace and atmosphere. Its environments draw from the Norwegian coastline and dense forest interiors, the lighting is deliberately minimal, and the story unfolds in short, deliberate beats. It is played as a walk through memory and clue, not as an exercise in combat or spectacle, and the design insists you pay attention to what is left unsaid as much as to what is shown.

This post includes spoilers. If you have not played the game and intend to, stop here.

Through the Woods places you in the role of Karen, a mother searching for her missing son, Espen. The viewpoint is third person, the camera close enough to feel like an observer and distant enough to keep some detail offscreen. Progression is driven by exploration, by reading notes and piecing together small narrative fragments, and by moving through spaces that shift between the literal and the folkloric. You do not receive weapons or direct means to fight. The tension is generated by movement, by timing, and by the limitations the game imposes on the player. Survival is procedural rather than mechanical: you avoid, you hide, you use light sparingly, and you decide when to press forward.

The creatures are drawn from a Norse-tinged folk vocabulary and they behave as extensions of the environment rather than isolated enemies. Among others, there are trolls, large and deliberate, that feel like obstacles the world itself has formed over time; there is the Huldra, a figure bound to darkness and light, whose reactions turn illumination into a risk; and there are the wolves Sköll and Hati, whose deception defines one of the more unsettling turns in the game. I spent time caught at the first troll area, then in the Huldra sequence where every step depended on how light was handled, and later at the wolves’ crossing where their betrayal reshaped the rhythm of play. None of them follow predictable patterns. They act through misdirection, waiting for distraction or misplaced certainty.

I completed the game in a few hours overall, spread across sessions. Work and other concerns meant I returned to it in fragments rather than as an uninterrupted run, and the game worked well in those gaps. The credits feature a quiet acoustic track that clears the air after the final scenes; I do not know the title yet but I want to find it because it felt like a necessary ledger for what came before. On the narrative side, the late revelation about Erik and his motives made the arc feel coherent rather than arbitrary. By the time Karen’s situation is made explicit, the pieces fit together with a logic that had already been hinted at, and a note about Erik’s intention supplies the connective tissue that the rest of the story had been arranging. I attempted the revived Espen sequence and spent time trying to change the outcome, but the game does not offer that repair.

Practical note: I will not invent how the scenes affected me emotionally beyond what I have said. I attempted to revive Espen and I predicted the ending from the clue about Erik. Those are actions and observations. I finished the game while needing distraction from other tasks and responsibilities. The soundtrack in the credits is one concrete detail I plan to track down. The character is explicitly revealed at the end and her choices become clear in the final scenes.

Finally, a personal aside in plain terms. My cat Bulou died today. She had a long standing tumour in her left eye. I buried her earlier. I hope she is at peace and no longer in pain.

Labels: motivation, spooky, Windows and Softwares

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