As anyone who has followed my content for a long time would know, I have a long-standing love affair with the immersive sim genre. Games like Thief, Hitman, and Dishonored all rank among some of my favorite games of all time, so any similar games in the vein tend to grab my attention.
In comes this little indie game called Gloomwood, which has all of those familiar trappings. And… well I can’t just ignore it!
Though the level we played feels more literally than I would want or expect from an immersive sim, it’s difficult at this point to determine if that’s how the game will play from here on out, or if that was only because this is the tutorial stage and it needs to be linear to get the player familiar with how Gloomwood plays.
That said, the atmosphere and setting are pitch perfect, making sure that the player feels like the odds are stacked against them. The guards are eerie and unsettling, with enough power to make us fearful of taking any more than one of them at a time. And yet, there are obvious gaps in their behavior and patrol patterns that allow us a daring, intrepid rogue to slip passed them or take them out silently. The graphics and art style also help recapture the feeling of launching Thief: The Dark Project for the first time.
I’ll be playing this more in my off time, looking forward to seeing how it develops.
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