some spare words about Gloomwood

Any work in this space is an exercise in trying to get me to write more. These are written in an hour maximum and are a bit messy round the edges in a deliberate attempt to make me stop trying too much. Maybe you can enjoy bits ?? I don't know. Thanks! Also there are spoilers.

Gloomwood creaks. If there’s one sound effect that permeates through this game’s entire ethos it’s creaking; floorboards moaning underfoot, doors that screech from their hinges, a lift that lets out a tremendous, bellowing groan. It goes a long way to sell a world that’s, to put it lightly, not in great shape, aching from what its as-yet-unknown antagonists have been up to. The creaking continues into other objects, too; there’s sputtering, dribbling sconces, guards whose wheezing coughs give away their imminent end, mechanisms that are reluctant to start and eager to stop. There’s an atmosphere here, to put it lightly; an atmosphere that flows freely from a rigorous understanding of the first-person perspective, from a truly decadent suite of sounds, from making every shadow into a chasm for light, and from a complete and utter disregard for how games ought to look.

Okay, so, New Blood’s low-poly, “boomer-shooter” approach to visual design is hilarious from certain angles - and undoubtedly ripe to be picked apart by those twitter accounts you see complaining that TLOU2’s blood doesn’t smear enough when you roll around in it like an animal. Obviously, I do not care about ‘The Graphics’ and nobody should care about ‘The Graphics’ - it limits our ability to truly let games get under our skin to care about ‘The Graphics’! But some people, bless their hearts, really care about… ‘The Graphics’. Stop caring about ‘The Graphics’ and embrace… the vibes.

Everything you do in Gloomwood is slow. Really slow. R e a l l y s l o w. You have to wait for Guards to finish long, languid patrol patterns while hiding in nooks and crannies, you have to press your ears up to doors to check the coast is clear for a cautious trudge across a hallway, you have to sluggishly pull yourself up long chains and ropes to slink across darkened rooftops. This caution is brought on by a whole number of factors - but most obviously it comes from the game’s approach to Souls-Style saving. There are phonograph save points scattered throughout the levels - they don’t replenish your health and reset enemies like your bonfires, sites of grace, and "goblin lanterns" do - but they serve as bookmarks interleaved between long stretches of cautious onward exploration. The levels loop back on themselves like in Souls games - expecting you to start small and gradually creep outwards, unlocking new scraps of territory to master until you have the lay of the complex, compact whole.

Why is this pace relevant? Precisely because it lets you slow-simmer into the tone - it forces you to care about environment, sound, pacing and lighting so that the image astounds even if the individual aspects are ripped straight from the 90s. Sluggishly poking your way through these dense knots of space means that you stay enough to let the game imprint itself into your brain beyond its first impressions - so you can latch onto the image . The mellow glow of a lighthouse lantern sweeping its way across a weary dock, or a skulking approach to a cliffside hut with its spluttering owner displacing the floorboards one step at a time.

It’s these images that let the game work its way into your imagination - but they just would not function if this title didn’t spend so much of its attention on the important stuff, on the immersive stuff. A lot of the game is spent in a cannery in which guts (fish? human? who’s to say?) coat much of the earliest floor you’ll slop your way across - and had the game rendered some exquisite lower intestine I might have found the section typical, ogglable, and forgettable. But by lavishing you in squelches, hiding the textures under heavy blotches of darkness, keeping you crawling through the level… your very own great organ - the brain, not the lower intestine - produces an image transcendent of ‘The Graphics’. The game burrows into your imagination and makes a little home there.

There’s more to this trick, of course. The way that your inventory is a physical, tactile object that you pull items from - out of the ‘menu world’ and into the ‘real world’. The way that NPCs travel just a little further than you think when investigating a distraction, or each surface having its own audible effect on your footsteps reminding you that you’re here. But all this only exists, only sings, because the game looks like it does - drenched in black and polygons askew.

The magic trick is creating a game that feels like it’s from the 90s - but the trompe l’oeil of its visual design is just a small brick in a larger edifice - it’s the façade that enables this game to feel like those games felt…. But not really. It feels better, but only because the care is placed where it need to be in order to let this world run riot in your very own imaginative sandpit.