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⠀Darkwood is one of those few games that really sunk into my soul. Having gone through it more than once and vacuumed it up and down for the presence of lore, there was only one thing left that did not give me peace.

⠀How could such a tenacious Being, which created a multi-kilometre ecosystem around itself, die so easily? How did one man with a simple flamethrower manage to deal with it?

⠀ In the next replay, having reached the “true” ending, I noticed one small detail. And it was sufficient to alter the game's ending entirely. Organise everything and take a deep breath. First things first, though. I'll begin with the weakest of arguments and work my way up from there.

⠀During the game, we are more than once convinced that all sleeping characters are in their most desired dreams. Regardless of all the horror that they have experienced, each of them sees the warmest and most satisfying dream in their consciousness.

⠀Such a dream even visits the main character once, returning him to his home. The house where everything is fine, only... by the time of this dream, we had already begun to intertwine with the woods into a single whole, greedily cramming into ourselves more and more new doses of "mushrooms." The hero throws himself out of that dream, realising that it will never be “same as before.” Having undergone mutations and having realised and digested the fact that you are only partially a human. Would you really want to return to your family’s house? Would you want them to see you like this?



⠀Counter question: why then does the hero continue to look for the Way Home if he knows that nothing will work out? ... Actually, what else can he do? The character is a military man. Straightforward, experienced, moderately cruel, and tempered in spirit. It’s better to try and fail than to give up completely and wait until God knows what.

⠀What am I all about? And to the fact that the Being in dreams tries to find a person’s innermost desires. Find something that can please him and give him a kind of happiness and peace. And at the first attempt, the Being misses, giving the military man the comfortable conditions as desired.

⠀Let's assume that we really woke up with the Being. Let's assume that, among hundreds of bodies, a colleague with a flamethrower was actually found. And this is in a place where not a single person has a single object with him, not only in his hands but even on himself. People in an unconscious state are undressed, and even if someone takes a stick or any other thing with them... Suppose that we set fire to the woods, and it burned to the ground. Now let’s rewind events from one day ago.



⠀The swamp. A huge tree, closely fused with the rest of the woods, blocks our path. We just can’t set it on fire “from the outside”; in the end, once it gets to its rhizome, the flame flares up, and... no chain reaction follows. Of all the trees, only one single one manages to suffer, and the rest, as if compacted, do not experience the slightest problem from their proximity to the giant fire.

⠀Meanwhile, the epilogue talks about a real chain reaction. They say the fire engulfed the entire woods. And really, over all these years, the residents, even in the best of times, when Darkwood had not yet acquired such a size, did not try to set fire to the trees and their copies? Are there really no such enthusiasts for the entire gigantic system? I'm willing to bet such attempts have been made. And not once, and not twice. For years, people tried to dig, cut, and burn their way through the woods. And it is unlikely that this caused him any significant damage.



⠀In response to this, we can say that we attacked its most vulnerable part, the very “heart of the woods,” and it was because of this that a chain reaction appeared. I have something to say about this.

⠀It is reliably known that the Being came to earth in the form of a meteorite in August 1975. Once again, she came from here, from space. For who knows how many centuries it flew through an extremely lifeless space?

⠀After such a space trip, it managed to survive without any problems, having also overcome the earth’s stratosphere. The stratosphere, where most meteorites burn to dust. If we assume that the giant pit that we see at the end is a crater from the landing of a meteorite, then it is not difficult to imagine how strong the explosion was and what loads our cosmic miracle can easily survive.

⠀It seems that after such facts, the harm from a standard flamethrower looks simply ridiculous against the backdrop of such a tenacious creature.

⠀If we do burn the woods, then the epilogue says that helicopters will fly to the remaining people. The same ones who never came to help even in the best of years? The same ones that stopped launching into the sky even after losing contact with the military expedition? It sounds a little sweet, don’t you think?



⠀Despite the fact that previously all contact with the remaining inhabitants of the woods was kept to a minimum, and many sincerely hated the military for their secrecy and absolute disinterest in saving people, reconnaissance and rescue expeditions are suddenly deployed again?

⠀However, all this argumentation probably sounds weak, plus or minus. Everything is somehow far-fetched, it can be interpreted differently, I don’t argue. So now I think it's time to reveal the last card. The one that made me decide to write this article.

⠀No matter what terrible death befell us, be it gassing, being devoured by a dog, or being beaten to death with sticks by savages, the same animation was always played. We fall on our backs and... that's it.



⠀This happens in all cases except the ending. Endings where we grab a flamethrower and burn Darkwood down with us. An ending in which the hero did not want to live in a “beautiful lie and got to the truth.” A combat-trained man, a military man, chose to fight to the end. And he won. Is it true?...



⠀The hero lies down in the same position that he took when he agreed to the “beautiful lie.” The hero, I repeat, a military man, for whom work in the middle of nowhere was a priority, found peace not in everyday life and a warm home, from which he initially fled somewhere far away in Darkwood, but in the struggle and victory over a giant unknown monster. And, having overcome it, he falls asleep, plunging into the same eternal peace and happiness as everyone else in this damned place.

⠀We didn’t burn the Woods, we just exchanged one lie for another.
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⠀Thank you for your attention.
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