Games from New Blood Interactive tend to wear their influences on their sleeves. Their breakout hit Dusk is a backwater horror take on Quake and Doom. Amid Evil gives a modern update to the classic Heretic and Hexen. Ultrakill takes the gameplay of Quake and adds in an aggressive layer of Devil May Cry style. Their latest game, Gloomwood just launched in Early Access, and this game is exactly what’s promised by the game’s URL, thiefwithguns.com. What makes their games extra special is that they go beyond the level of mere imitation, forging their own unique identities through strong style choices and smart design decisions. From the first act of Gloomwood, it’s clear that they’re already off to an incredible start.
You, the doctor, wake up in a pit. Your captors taunt you until a mysterious stranger sneaks in, gives you your equipment and sets you free, telling you to meet him at a nearby lighthouse. With your cane sword in hand, you sneak your way through the shadows to escape to the dark Victorian city of Gloomwood. As you attempt to stay in the shadows, a magical ring on your finger gives an indication of how visible you are at any time. Pairing that with excellent sound design makes the stealth easily readable. Different materials make different amounts of sound as you walk on them, which is all immediately clear to you just from a quick glance, allowing you to plan your routes effectively. Gloomwood is a stealth game through and through, so killing a guard with a surprise cane stab is vastly preferable to a loud fight that will leave you bloodied.
What makes Gloomwood something really special is the way that it mixes in elements of the survival horror genre into its Thief influences. Guns are quickly added to your arsenal, but you don’t frequently come across ammo. Even if you’re good at bullet counting, it’s still not a get out of jail free card. Huntsmen, the creepy enemies that stalk you through the levels, still take a few shots to take down, and the gunshot noise will definitely draw any nearby bad guys to further complicate the fight. If you don’t manage to take down an enemy stealthily, they will manage to chip away at your health before you take them down no matter what weapon you’re using, making health another resource you have to manage, survival horror style. Normally immersive sim players are known to obsessively quick save in order to maximize experimentation with the many systems of the game, but Gloomwood leans even more into Resident Evil here, only allowing you to save at phonographs that are sparingly placed throughout. This decision really ratchets up the tension, compounding with the atmosphere to make for an incredibly creepy experience.
The excellent level design of Gloomwood also leans into the traditions of both the Thief and Resident Evil series. The opening wonderfully tutorializes all the mechanics before letting you loose in an open area with multiple paths that heavily reward exploration. I initially tried to take the path that it seemed the game was leading me towards, and I kept getting killed. After stepping away from the game for a night, I started over and noticed that there was a place early on where I could stack boxes to reach an upper level. This opened up a whole new path that was full of hidden secrets, eventually leading me right to where the first path I followed was trying to take went. Once again taking hints from survival horror, you’re constantly finding keys to unlock doors that provide new shortcuts back to the save room, slowly opening up an impressively dense and interconnected level akin to the old Resident Evil mansion.
All these great design decisions really pay off in creating a supremely spooky game. The graphics are the same low poly style that worked so well in Dusk, which looks stellar. In addition to the strong visual identity, the game has incredible lighting that both looks great and is mechanically important to the stealth. One of the tensest moments I came across was a stretch along the pier where the distant lighthouse was occasionally lighting up the area, getting rid of all the shadows for brief periods of time. Nothing is creepier than hearing those Huntmen, whose eyes emit a different color depending on their level of alert, muttering menacing threats as you’re trying to scramble around a corner before the lighthouse ruins your shadowy hiding spot.
There’s a strong element of desperation that’s added to the game by not including any user interface to indicate ammo or health. All these interactions are handled with different little button commands. For example, if you hold the reload button, you open your weapon to check how many bullets you have remaining, which is a tense thing to do just before going into what may turn into a firefight. For me, the most fun UI flair was the inventory, which is handled like the classic RE4 grid-based system, using a briefcase you actually have to have room to set on the ground and rifle through.
I played through the three areas of this first act of Gloomwood in approximately three hours, and I can’t wait for more. There’s definitely enough here to warrant additional playthroughs in order to uncover secrets hidden throughout. There’s bits of story you can pick up through dialogue between Huntmen, and one big section labeled “in development” provides a tantalizing peak at the horrifying world they’re slowly building. A good immersive sim takes time, so it will probably be a year or two before we see the finished product, but based on what we’ve seen so far Gloomwood is a classic in the making that will definitely be worth the wait.
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