‘The exhaustion on screen is 100% real’: The solo dev of this ‘live-action’ survival game spent 40 grueling days alone in the wilderness to create it

If you’ve grown a bit weary of survival games where a stick and a rock can automagically be combined to make a tree-felling axe and you can build a comfortable base in a matter of minutes, how about something a bit more authentic?

Wordless Forest is a FMV (Full Motion Video) survival game that could wind up feeling more realistic than most of what you’ll find on Steam—because its creator actually went out into the woods for weeks on end to make it. Solo developer Dogus Cagrici both stars in the game and recorded all the footage himself while hiking alone deep in the real wilderness.

That makes the creation of the game sound like a survival experience in itself, with Cagrici recording footage of himself “in the dense forests and wilderness of four different cities across Turkey for 40 days. Without a production vehicle, I hiked for kilometers carrying heavy camera gear on my back just to reach remote locations,” Cagrici says.

“Operating out of a remote forest pension as my basecamp, I hiked deep into territory actively shared with brown bears and wild boars every single day. The danger shifted with the geography; in Muğla, I waded into freezing rivers and worked in soaking wet clothes, while in Antalya, I filmed alone on the edge of treacherous cliffs where a single misstep could have been fatal.”

I suspect this is true: “The exhaustion on screen is 100% real,” Cagrici says.

The Steam page and trailer for Wordless Forest definitely demonstrates that: we see Cagrici’s character drinking from puddles, eating raw fish, and attempting to start a fire and cross icy rivers. Players will be able to make choices to determine what the character does next in life-or-death situations, such as choosing to approach or ignore a mysterious noise in the woods at night. (I wish it showed a third option: run away screaming, because that’s how I’d handle it.)

Some of those choices aren’t gonna end well: the trailer shows a few of what I assume are game-enders, such as when we see the character falling off a cliff and landing on the rocks below or being dragged lifelessly down the rapids.

If you’re wondering why it’s called Wordless Forest, it’s because the game is completely dialogue free. That’s a selling point for me: as a fan of survival films where the dialogue is at a minimum, like Cast Away, All is Lost, and Inside, there’s something deeply fascinating about watching someone try to survive while absorbing all the information visually rather than having it plainly spelled out in dialogue or voice over.

I’m also intrigued because Wordless Forest may be the first game of its kind: an FMV survival game. I know there have been a few FMV survival horror games (Phantasmogoria leaps to mind), but I can’t think of any straight-up survival games with an FMV format. A search of SteamDB for survival games with the FMV tag only brings up four hits, and none of those look strictly like survival games.

Cagrici says Wordless Forest has been in development for nearly three years. It’s due out in August on Steam.

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