Darkwood contains three different difficulty settings. As of now, they all simply revolve around player death and the severity of the punishment for dying. All other statistics remain unchanged. That is, finishing the game without ever dying in Normal is as good as finishing in Nightmare.
The difficulty modes cannot be changed on the fly. Once picked, there is no way back.
Difficulties[]
Normal[]
"The forgiving mode. When dying, you drop a part of your equipment."
The player has unlimited lives.
Hard[]
"The unforgiving mode. You have a limited number of lives. After that, it's game over."
The player starts with four lives[?], which are displayed as skulls on the HUD next to the health bar.
Nightmare[]
"The ultimate thrill. Death is permanent."
The player has only one life.
Death[]
Dying in Normal or Hard:
- The player drops a randomly selected half of their items in the Inventory. The dropped items are stored in a backpack where the player died, which is marked on the Player Map with a blood spatter. Every time the player dies, the enemies that were previously killed by the player respawn at a different location, except for the ones in unique locations.
Losing the all lives in Hard or dying in Nightmare:
- In Chapter 1, results in the player's save file being deleted.
- In Chapter 2, restarts Chapter 2 with the same equipments, skills and Essence that they bring from Chapter 1, while the locations will be shuffled.
Trivia[]
- In older versions, instead of losing half their items, the player lost two level-ups worth of skills and all of their Hallucinogens, and the player's melee weapons suffered from a durability penalty.
- Deaths of the Protagonist prematurely are likely not canon in Darkwood, otherwise it will have serious lore implications and conflicts.