I learned how it can make a set-piece from a chain, a broken wall, and a guard with a key in their back pocket. I learned how it likes to play its little puzzles, with a locked safe and - seemingly - no note to the combination nearby. Not sure I'm up to that, but I did at least start to learn the way Gloomwood thinks over the course of my first hour or so with it. It's the freedom that's earned by understanding the systems, making the most of them, and hopefully thinking of something nobody's ever done before. This is the kind of freedom that a game can only give you when it deals, paradoxically, in real rigour. I had the shadows here, and the one-hit kill thingy. And I suddenly realised that I wasn't weak at all, but powerful. In the distance was a lighthouse, which is always money in the bank with me, and between me and the lighthouse. Gloomwood is sort of grim Victoriana, so I emerged from the brick chambers of a down-market fishery and onto a sort of sodden wharf. But then after a while I found myself outside. I liked all this when I was in these early stages, which are basically just an evocative tutorial. So much better to crouch, go slowly, considering the surfaces you're moving across, using the leaning buttons to check around blind corners, using patience, sweet patience, to learn the patrol routes and then go for the one-hit backstab. Take guards on and they'll slice your health away and slow you down. I always know where I want to go, but my path there has a bit of leeway to it.Ĭombat I quickly discover, even with the swordstick, is a bad idea. Gloomwood's linear but roomy: like I say, immersive-sim territory. I need to get out, which might mean finding the objects needed to call a kind of grain elevator, and may mean busting my swordstick out of a nearby lockup. Instead I'm in small squirrely rooms, keeping out of the path of patrolling guards, lurking in the dark, moving from one safe spot to the next.
Gloomwood developers Pc#
Availability: Out now on PC in early access.Publisher: Newblood Interactive, Dillon Rogers, David Szymanski.
The ring allows me to tell when I'm hidden in shadow, and once it's on my hand and the grate has been opened, I start to realise how useful it's going to be. Navigating the lovingly rendered PS1 era visuals, which do help a great deal to make ordinary objects singular and creepy, I awake at the bottom of a pit with nothing but a mysterious ally, taunting me through a nearby grate before offering me a magic ring. This is immersive-sim-ish territory, everything tilted towards horror and stealth. Gloomwood came alive for me when I got outside.
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