Honestly bro it's ridiculous how good this game is for how simple it also is. It's very clearly taking inspiration from other great immersive sims. There's literally a bundle of this game and System Shock 2. There's no doubt that the game has its inspirations, but then despite being a simple indie game, I'd rank it just as highly as them. It is definitely clunky. It can be improved in a lot of ways, but from a design perspective, this game is practically perfect. The core concept is already there and I wouldn't ask for anything different except just more of it.
This game is the concept of an immersive filter distilled down to its purest form. It has what I would consider the three pillars of immersive sims:
- Rewarding exploration. Useful resources are hidden literally everywhere, even in super out of the way loctions. It's worth climbing up a building that you think would be considered out-of-bounds because for some reason, some dude's credit card is hidden in its gutter. Exploring thoroughly is worthwhile. You will genuinely find useful things for doing it.
- Branching paths. The game has multiple different paths and they generally always fall into one of three categories. Either "requires a resource", "requires an ability" or "you just need to know that it exists". Some obstacles have very obvious paths wherein you could use your resources to surpass them, but if you look around, you can find some very well-hidden paths that will let you bypass it practically for free. It's rare that you have no other option but to just go straight through an obstacle.
- Resource management. This ties into the points above. Your ability to get past obstacles depends directly on how many resources you have. If you've got none, you usually have to just fight enemies directly. Either way, you're going to be using resources to do this and you often have to pick and choose how many things you can afford to use.
All other immersive sim games embody this, but Gloomwood, it feels, has distilled this down to its most basic form. The gameplay is super deep and you can come up with tons of solutions to any problem. The game rewards your intelligence and punishes you for being careless.
Gloomwood also deserves a medal for offering to highest amount of "♥♥♥♥, do I actually have to go in there?" situations I've ever seen. System Shock 2 did the same thing (Hydroponics deck...), but Gloomwood will regularly put you before a ♥♥♥♥-encrusted, seemingly bottomless hole in the ground, then tell you to ignore the gurgling from within it and just hop right in! And of course, the area afterwards is a toxic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ where you hear enemies groaning just around every corner, where the air itself is hazardous and where you also have no way back. The sheer ratio of horror to relief is large enough that whenever I'm in a safe area, I don't feel like going back outside into the madness. It's genuinely stressful. I love it. No other game scares the ♥♥♥♥ out of my quite like Gloomwood.
This is enhanced by the game offering a save point system. It's a lot more intense when you can't save until you can reach a specific location. Such a simple thing to implement, but so many games just offer quick saves and nothing else.
The game's AI also deserves praise. Enemies are smart as hell. Most of them have some kind of ranged option and all of them are smart enough to path find to you, break down obstacles in the way, climb over obstacles, drop off of ledges. I hardly ever found situations where an enemy just stood there, unable to hurt me, while I shot it to death. It's terrifying to make a noise or have a scuffle with somebody, then you hear the rapidly approaching footsteps of his friends, so you hide in a nearby room, but they come up, smash the door down and start exploring the whole room until they find you. The last game I can remember that did that was Metal Gear Solid 2 (from 2003) with its room searching mechanic.
The story of the game is still unfinished. To be honest, it seems like they might have planned too much content for the game to finish at their current pace, but I guess we'll so how that goes. At the moment, the game takes a solid 20ish hours to finish at a casual pace, but it also has a game of collecting 5 McGuffins, called "seals". I only collected one in 20 hours. The game currently ends around the midpoint of collecting the second one. The story is barebones, but it provides enough motivation and context for why your character is doing what he's doing.
I think that's more or less it. I'd give them game a solid 9/10, even unfinished. It's just as good as the other famous immersive sims and the dev deserves huge praise for achieving that with just two dudes.
