It’s not often that I’m so directly in a game that I follow its development as closely as I can, but that’s the effect Gloomwood (opens in new tab)The demo had me when it came out on Steam in 2020. Good immersive sims only come once every few years, so I’ll take what I can get, but that short vertical bit convinced me that New Blood Interactive has something special here: a neo-victorian stealth game with the vibes of Bloodborne and the backstabs, shadow hopping and constant vulnerability from Thief.
Now released in early access, I’m happy to say that Gloomwood is going to be awesome. New Blood has really mastered the basics – the opening levels are eerie, expansive spaces with multiple solutions and menacing guards that are just the right amount of stupid. I love the lethality of my pointed cane sword, the click of the revolver as I check his ammunition, and the satisfaction of stepping right past an unsuspecting goon in a pitch-black shadow.
What I don’t like is that there just isn’t enough of it right now.
secret king
Gloomwood starts by throwing you into a nasty pit. You’re an unnamed doctor (an “outsider,” according to your captors) rotting in a fish gut prison. A shadowy figure quickly provides a way to escape and grab your gear, which is essentially all the direction the game offers. From there, the context comes in scraps gleaned from written notes and hostile dialogue.
There may have been other interesting bits of story shared by a blabbing guard, but if so, I was almost certainly distracted by tricky stealth encounters. Gloomwood is the rare stealth game that likes to betray you if you step too far into a bright spot or jog when you should have been walking. It’s a wake-up call from modern stealth games like Dishonored, Watch Dogs, and Hitman that have trained me to feel essentially invisible as long as I’m crouched down. It’s a good thing Gloomwood includes its version of Thief’s light meter – a ring always visible on the doctor’s hand that glows according to how conspicuous you are.
The ring is a genius piece of immersive technology, but it’s just one of Gloomwood’s cool diegetic design choices. Perhaps my favorite item in the game is the doctor’s briefcase with a grid-based inventory system. It sounds a bit silly to go gushing over an inventory grid like that, but there’s more to it than that.
Almost every object that can be picked up lives in the suitcase like a 3D model, not a scribble on a list. To even see the inventory, the Doc needs enough space to put the briefcase in the world (either on the floor or on a table). Time doesn’t stop rummaging through pockets, so something as simple as injecting a health syringe calls for tactical considerations. The space is limited by the size of the grid, but also by how good I am at inventorying Tetris. At first I tried to keep a tidy suitcase with a corner for throwing items, a column for guns and another for healing items, but within hours I would turn it into clutter (a fitting reflection of my actual desk). Even cooler is the ability to literally drag items out of the case into the world as if the mouse were your hand.
I appreciate Gloomwood’s dedication to the bit – the manual process of discarding objects one by one later made me question whether I really needed to carry another glass bottle when I already have three empty fish cans stuffing my suitcase full. Gloomwood shows just as little mercy when it comes to weapons. The only way to see how much ammunition is in the revolver is to hold R to open the chamber and count the bullets. This is cool as hell, except for the several times I’ve wanted to check ammo only to realize it’s too dark to see the gun.
appetizer
After my first playthrough, I still have no idea what’s going on in Gloomwood, but that made sense when I realized that the three levels currently available are basically one big tutorial. While the very first Fishing Area is a perfect mix of multi-storey indoor spaces and outdoor exploration, the cave and cliff areas that follow are noticeably more sparse with fewer alternative routes. I hope that later levels increase in complexity.
I was often distracted by the future during my Gloomwood playthrough. So many cool things happen in the first few hours that the frequent reminders of the unfinished state became annoying — the most overt, immersion-breaking example was a house in the third area that teases an encounter with a scary beast only to be greeted with a sealed door that says ‘under development’.
The difficulty levels are also too limited. There are now normal and hard presets, but I really want to tweak the rules to my liking. The first thing I would disable is Gloomwood’s strict control that only allows storing in specific safe rooms. Call me a normie, but no stealth game is complete without save/load shortcuts.
Just when I started getting all the cool stuff like the shotgun and the multi-purpose Undertaker pistol, it was already over. For now, the town of Gloomwood visible in the distance is just a decoration. Unfortunately!
I think this is a tempo issue that is inevitable until there is more Gloomwood to play. It’s fine the way it is, but unless you’re really desperate for a compelling sim fix, you’d better wait until it’s all out, which is exactly what I’m up to right now. New Blood estimates that will be “at least a year or two.” Worth the wait, I think.
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