Planned Release Date: Q1 2027

About This Game

One night. One town. One lantern.

Wickwood is a top-down pixel-art action game about getting out of a small town in the woods before your light runs out.

No hunger bar. No thirst. No crafting bench, no base to build, no inventory to sort. A weapon in your hands, fuel on your belt, and a road heading south.

The light is the clock

A full tank burns for four minutes. While it burns, the warm circle around you closes in: the colour drains from white to orange, and in the last quarter the light begins to stutter.

Nothing on screen counts down. You read the time you have left off the ground at your feet.

Jerry cans are out there in the dark. Finding one is not a bonus — it is the difference between finishing the job and walking home blind.

Three things come for you

• The Walker takes hit after hit and never stops closing.
  
• The Runner is made of glass and crosses the gap in a single lunge.
  
• The Spitter never comes near you. It doesn't have to.

They arrive in waves, with quiet in between. Break away far enough for long enough and they lose you — but the quiet never lasts.

Everything is melee

• You start with a bat and earn an axe. Both swing in an arc in front of you, and both root you in place while they do.
  
• The dodge roll has real invulnerability frames — a sliver in the middle of the roll, not the whole of it.
  
• Death costs you ground, not progress. You wake at the last campfire with full health and walk back in.

Work your way out

The campground. The old cemetery. The hollow. The dump. The worksite. The rail sidings. The Last Chance Gas station. The sheriff's office.

The jobs chain into one another until the last one: an abandoned car on the road south, missing a battery, a jack and a wheel. Carry the battery and you cannot swing at anything. Pick your route.

Plainly

• About an hour from the first swing to the sunrise, in one sitting.
  
• No NPCs, no dialogue trees, no shopkeepers. The town tells you what it needs, where it needs it.
  
• One continuous night. The only sunrise in the game is the one you drive into.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Wickwood is made by one developer, and generative AI was used openly in its production. Here is exactly where:

- Code: the game's GDScript code, the pixel-drawing scripts and the build/test tools were written with Claude (Anthropic) under the developer's design, direction and review.
- Text: the in-game notes and place descriptions, the ending credits and the store page copy were drafted with Claude and edited and approved by the developer.
- Music: all music tracks (world, main menu, finale) were generated with Google's Lyria from prompts written by the developer.
- Artwork: tilesets, characters and creatures are hand-drawn commercial pixel-art packs (credited in-game), not AI-generated. Some landmark props (the standing stones, the cave interiors, the bunker hatch and similar pieces) were drawn or assembled pixel by pixel by scripts written with Claude, using the palettes and parts of those packs.
- Sound effects were sourced from Freesound and Kenney's sound packs.
- Store art (capsules, logo, icons) was made by hand; screenshots and video are captured from the game itself.

No AI runs during gameplay: nothing is generated live, and the game does not connect to any online AI service.