{"id":1673529,"date":"2026-08-24T22:12:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T22:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/5varggPRQLGUJ98cXpeGZ5"},"modified":"2026-08-24T22:12:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T22:12:51","slug":"a-game-dev-spent-40-days-in-the-wilderness-to-make-this-new-steam-survival-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/a-game-dev-spent-40-days-in-the-wilderness-to-make-this-new-steam-survival-game\/","title":{"rendered":"A game dev spent 40 days in the wilderness to make this new Steam survival game"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’ve always wondered how I’d fare in a survival situation. Lost in the woods, with no food or water, how long would I last? Would I make good choices? Could I find my way back to safety?<\/p>\n

The answers to those questions are almost certainly “Not long, no, and definitely not,” and hopefully I’ll never have to actually find out. In the meantime, I try to live out my survival fantasies through films and games, and Wordless Forest, which launched on Steam today, is sorta both.<\/p>\n

Wordless Forest is an FMV survival game<\/a> solo developer Dogus Cagrici shot while hiking in the “dense forests and wilderness of four different cities across Turkey for 40 days<\/a>.” It’s completely dialogue-free (hence the title) as the character Cagrici plays finds himself alone in the wilds, trying to find his way to safety and put his scrambled memories back together after a head injury.<\/p>\n

As the survivor attempts to make his way to a distant firewatch tower, you’ll have to make choices for him. There’s some food at an abandoned campsite that may be unsafe to eat: should you risk it? A dark cave might present some shelter but also be hiding danger: should you check it out? And maybe most importantly, your dog is missing: should you follow its footprints deeper into the wilderness, or focus on getting yourself to safety? The choices are presented on-screen as an either\/or option, and clicking one will advance the story in that direction. <\/p>\n

I see the early reviews on Steam are mixed, and I’m not that surprised. I played through Wordless Forest this morning, and it’s not the most interactive adventure, really: over about 45 minutes of my runthrough there weren’t a huge amount of choices to make, and I can imagine some players might find more of a short interactive movie than a game.<\/p>\n

But despite the short running time and lean interactivity, I still found it pretty compelling. It’s well-filmed, especially considering Cagrici did seemingly everything himself, including clambering up cliffs, crawling into caves, and even eating raw fish. You think a lot of survival game devs would subject themselves to that?<\/p>\n

Most of all, I appreciate stories that can be told with minimal dialogue, especially survival stories. All Is Lost, the Robert Redford film about a man trying to survive at sea after his boat is damaged, is done with nearly no dialogue, and the best parts of Cast Away are done in near-silence, too. <\/p>\n

I like that approach to storytelling. It’s the extreme of the “show, don’t tell” rule, and Wordless Forest does a good job pulling it off. You’ll find it here on Steam<\/a>, where it’s 10% off for the next two weeks.<\/p>\n

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