This photorealistic Steam survival game could've killed its creator

Wordless Forest is an FMV game that takes player immersion to a totally new level

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."

Wordless Forest contains no dialogue, which is unusual for FMV games. The player has to make choices about how Cagrici proceeds, but there's no inner monologue or narration that tells the player how to feel.

"This is an unforgiving world where the story is shaped not by words, but by those choices you make," Wordless Forest's Steam page reads. "One wrong decision or a single overlooked detail has irreversible consequences."

To capture the footage, Cagrici traveled to four different cities in Turkey over 40 days. Twenty of those days were spent in Turkey's largest continuous forest, the Yenice Forests. Cagrici says that he would sometimes hike for multiple kilometers just to get a perfect shot for the game.

"The danger shifted with the geography," the Steam page continues. "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."

Cagrici is the writer, director, actor, editor, and coder behind the game, and he's been working on it for two and a half years. After so much toil in the wilderness, Wordless Forest is finally set to release on August 24, 2026. Cagrici came out of his adventure in one piece, but he's hoping his efforts will lead to an unparalleled level of immersion.

"I hope you feel that raw, unsettling isolation when you play," Cagrici writes.

You can wishlist Wordless Forest here.