![]() ![]() ![]() It being aimed more at kids also doesn't mean that you, an adult, wouldn't enjoy it anyway. It might be linear and obvious to me, a hardened player with a thousand yard stare from all the hours playing Fromsoft games and reviewing Resi 7, but this is a technically non-violent game where you zap shadow monsters with a torch in order to save your cousin from nightmare versions of school bullies! And it's pretty great at that, you know? Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Tequila Works This is a game that feels squarely directed at children - not six-year-olds, of course, but kids in that sort of grey, pre-teen area. But I also don't think it's really aimed at survival horror veterans, or even adults at all. This could mean that for experienced survival horror veterans, or even games in general, Gylt could be disappointingly easy. There are also optional collectibles to find that include baby's first text logs, but none of them are very far off the beaten track at all. You can sneak behind some enemies to do instant stealth takedowns, engage in boss fights that are largely just timed stealth segments, and you get a recharging stun attack and a fire extinguisher to open up traversal options around environmental hazards. The reason why this is Alan-Wake-for-kids, though, is because these monsters have the smarts of a bag of spanners, to put it bluntly, and batteries for your torch (which only drain when you focus it for attacks) and inhalers to refill your health are stashed by an extremely generous hand around the school and adjacent buildings you explore. They are not unlike the ones you find in Alan Wake. The monsters come in a few variants that include 'invisible', 'cow', and 'terrifying mannequins' of oneself. Sally has few defences save creeping around and shining a powerful torch at the monsters, who don't like strong li- hey, now my title makes sense! One autumnal evening, Sally gets lost and tries to take the old mining cable car back home - only to discover herself in a weird mirror version of her home town, derelict and abandoned save for shadowy monsters, the likes of which you'd find as models in Forbidden Planet in a cabinet labelled "From The Mind Of Tim Burton". You play as Sally, a young girl whose even younger cousin Emily has gone missing. Now that could very well be due to the pre-launch reviewer period, but reporting what I know in home internet conditions (102 Megabits per second), Stadia is more than capable of running this low-key tale.Until recently, Gylt (look, stay with it) was confined to Google's cloud gaming platform Stadia, but Stadia doesn't exist any more, so this third-person stealth adventure is being unleashed on Steam. Even running on the Pixel the game controlled well with a controller (you need to plug it in at this time, so have a holder/attachment ready), and I saw very little in the way of visual bugs or frameskips. I had the chance to test out Gylt running on a PC, a Google Pixel 3a, and a ChromeCast (the latter is the preferred method). It’s weird to think of how a game “runs” on Stadia, since it’s not technically hardware, but it is a new delivery system. That’s kind of a Tequila Works signature, for what it’s worth. From a narrative standpoint Gylt doesn’t offer up a lot of revelatory material: instead preferring a slow burn as the story mostly serves as a way to move you from place to place as it quietly ponders your situation. Some are more effective than others, offering up lingering dread rather than jump scares, or better enemy placements that make for more engaging stealth gameplay. ![]() How much fun (or emotional quotient) you get out of it is completely dependent on the area itself. It’s got collectibles and light puzzler-boss battles. It has the classic action-adventure “move this object around to the right spot” brain teasers. There’s locations to scour for keys to open doors. ![]() Much of it is guided - either through some tense linear scenes or story sequences - and the rest is structured as a series of light puzzles. You know the drill for these types of games by now. The former theme is best reinforced by the item base, one of which is an inhaler that restores health, or soda cans that can be used to distract said baddies. You know, Cthulian eyeball tendrils, creepy creatures, things of that nature. We essentially get two stories: one is grounded in reality and deals with the very troubling life of Sally and Emily, and the other is a macabre mix of horror genre stylings of the “T-for-Teen” variety. What begins as a tale about a bullied girl searching for another lost child slowly descends into madness, as shadow creatures (both literal and allegorical) pop up to wreak havoc on our headstrong hero Sally. ![]()
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