For Dogus Cagrici, there were no shortcuts if he wanted to create the most gripping survival game possible. The Steam developer and actor behind Wordless Forest spent weeks in the middle of nowhere. No cell signal or easy way to escape danger. When he came face-to-face with creatures like bears, boars, and snakes, he had to figure out what to do all by himself.
“I survived countless falls and almost broke my foot several times out there,” Cagrici writes in the press kit for his upcoming Steam game. Wordless Forest is a live-action, interactive fiction game where all the events were captured first-hand by the creator. Equipped with only a backpack and a camera, Cagrici says he withstood the dangers of the Turkish wilderness for weeks at a time. Everything the player sees in the game — Cagrici struggling in an icy cold river, biting the entrails of a raw fish, or stumbling over a tricky hike — actually happened, to a certain extent. Some situations were staged for the purposes of the script. But the skills that Cagrici uses throughout the game to survive the ordeal are legitimate, he says.
“The physical toll was constant,” Cagrici says in the press kit. “The exhaustion on screen is 100% real.”
