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I’ve completed the demo of Gloomwood. It’s obvious that as time goes on, immersive sims are increasingly shifting to the indie games scene, and Gloomwood is one of the more notable examples that might be telling if this shift works. I have very different thoughts about the demo. https://twitter.com/bad_attitude_en/status/1351610717930213379
I’ll start with a disclaimer. The demo was out half a year ago, and according to the team, the game has significantly progressed since then. Thus, many of my demo impressions might be irrelevant when the full game launches. We shall see!
Gloomwood is a very emotional, excited love letter to classic Thief games. Out of all recent immersive sims, this game comes closest to Looking Glass’ classic stealth game both in terms of visual design and gameplay mechanics.
The devs don’t even try to hide it (nor should they!). At times the game openly quotes Thief. In one secret location you can find a letter written in a way you might think it’s authored by Garrett. The demo ends with a direct quote from Garrett – “Inside at last!”.
The game is being positioned as a survival horror. Well, there is nothing horrific in the demo. You hide in the shadows from creepy monsters, but it’s not a horror game. However, Thief was very creepy at times, so maybe the full version of Gloomwood will be a proper horror.
You play as a mysterious person in a city that looks exactly like The City. Weird and creepy creatures roam its streets and sewers – you need to avoid them by hiding in dark corners and not making noise.
Like in Thief, light and shadows play a crucial role in the gameplay. If you are in a pitch black shadow, enemies won’t spot you even if they try to literally walk through you. If you are in bright light, they would immediately see you and attack.
The sound-based stealth system is similarly completely copied from Thief. If you walk on stone or pavements, it’s relatively safe, but if you try to even slowly move on metal plates, enemies nearby will hear you immediately.
It’s an honest immersive sim game – you can feel it even in this demo. You can pick up and toss things to create distractions. You can stack crates and sacks to climb to reach heights, or you can break them to occasionally find coins inside. Many systems are at play in this game.
Unlike the last Thief game by Eidos Montreal, light is systemically processed by the engine and not “baked” into map files. Like in classic Thief games, your exposure is gradual – you can be barely visible, more visible, etc., it’s not just on or off.
Thus, stealth mechanics in Gloomwood are completely copied from Thief, and it’s great. In modern immersive sims you usually hide by breaking line of sight or stay above ground – nothing wrong with that, but I missed light-and-shadows stealth SO much.
Unlike Thief, Gloomwood gives you guns. You have a canesword, but also a revolver and a shotgun. So if you are spotted, you can defend yourself. However, on higher difficulties you are killed with one or two hits, so I’d suggest you rather hide, not try to fight.
On top of that, on higher difficulties you are severely starved of any resources. In my playthrough, I think I found just two or three bullets for the shotgun – as you can imagine, it’s not exactly the amount of ammo to play this like a shooter game.
The demo has just two types of enemies, weird humanoid heavily breathing “guards” with axes and shotguns, and somewhat creepy monsters you can find in the sewers. They are not too horrifying, but sneaking around them is pretty tense.
Stylistically, this is a 100% Thief inspired game. The levels and character models I think have even less polygons than 1998’s Thief. Everything is grey and brown. You can’t see SHIT in dark places. This is great! Retro and minimalist style doesn’t break immersion one bit.
So far so good – it all sounds like Gloomwood is a proud copy of Thief: The Dark Project (yes, the first game) both in terms of gameplay and visuals. Awesome – after all, TDP is my all-time favorite game. Well, not everything is great in Gloomwood demo, unfortunately.
The first thing that jumped at me is a completely lifeless, shallow game world. Thief had the city inhabited by actual people who constantly talked, muttered, left notes behind. It was so cool to quietly observe their lives, peeping from dark corners. Gloomwood has none of that.
You can find a few notes that hint that there are (or were) actual people, but the game pits you against just weird creatures, not humans. It feels like you are playing a squeezed out surrogate of a Thief game, devoid of any life and characters. It’s all just bare mechanics.
The issues with worldbuilding don’t stop there. The game world has very little detail. Rooms are often empty boxes. There is barely any architectural detail in the game, almost no plinths, beams, furniture. A couple of crates here and there, and that’s it.
Let me clarify that this is NOT a complaint about the graphical fidelity (e.g. “the game looks bad”). This is about the game world feeling lifeless and empty. You don’t feel these spaces are inhabited by someone. These are just corridors and rooms to hide in and search for coins.
Incredible worldbuilding is one of the reasons Thief still plays great 20+ years later. Yes, the game has few polygons, but you still believe in the characters and places they live in.
Lord Bafford has a nice library full of books he never read. Ramirez just left his bedroom – you can find his tea set by a fireplace.
Gloomwood demo, that was released in 2020, in this sense feels more dated and shallow than Thief that was out in 1998.
Gloomwood demo, that was released in 2020, in this sense feels more dated and shallow than Thief that was out in 1998.
To finish the worldbuilding point, I was a bit disappointed with Gloomwood’s sound design. In Thief you constantly hear a plethora of sounds – ambient noise, crackling of torches, the howl of wind, footsteps and coughs of guards. In Gloomwood, the soundscapes are not that rich.
Now on to game mechanics. Let me tell you how much I hate checkpoints in games. Granted, in linear shooters, they might make sense, but I’m convinced there is nothing more wrong and outright evil than not having an opportunity to freely save anywhere in an immersive sim game.
You can be creative about solving challenges, have fun, then make a mistake and die – and you would be forced to play through the same areas again, but this time, just irritated by the need to do the exact same things you already did. It completely destroys immersion and fun.
In Gloomwood demo, you can only save at special phonographs – there are only two of them. The system is clearly taken from Resident Evil and it’s not working here. At some point I almost abandoned the game as I just didn’t want to repeat the same actions for the fifth time.
The devs already confirmed you’d be able to save anywhere in the full game – thanks God! However, apparently you will be penalized for that – oh God. I don’t think there is a need to reinvent the wheel. It’s great when you can enjoy a game the way that is comfortable for you.
So why did I have to repeat the same actions five times? Because the game has a somewhat flawed stealth system and significantly flawed level design. Closer to the end of the demo, you need to steal a certain item from an underground room, and then escape. I hated that section.
Let’s start with a level design. The only way to enter the room is by dropping down from a place above, and you can’t use the same way to then escape. I spent quite some time looking for safe and quiet ways out – there are none.
Well, maybe there are – but most of the room is PITCH dark, and you bump into walls while trying to move around. You can’t raise your lantern as there are monsters everywhere. I’m not a fan of linear levels in immersive sims, coupled with inability to see where you are heading.
(To be frank, Thief had the exact same issue when it comes to painfully navigating pitch dark areas. However, this was in 1998, and level design in games has significantly advanced since then. Some aspects of classics age well, but some of them do not.)
So, the only way to escape the room is to take an elevator up. To do so, you need to call for it. And when it arrives, a loud ringing starts that attracts all the monsters in the neighborhood. It’s not exactly a stealth-friendly way of playing the game!
It would’ve been cool if you could use this noise as a distraction and escape while monsters are searching for threats. However, as soon as the alarm sets off, the creatures just turn around and rush not to the sound, but to you – even if you hide in the darkest of shadows!
This reminded me of a similarly flawed stealth system in the original Deus Ex, where enemies would also magically know exactly where you are as soon as they were on high alert. Deus Ex, however, was not a purely stealth game, and it was released in the year 2000.
Judging by the devs’ remarks on the Steam forums, it’s not that the enemies magically know where you are – they just start to see way better in the dark when they are alerted. In any case, in the demo the system looks broken. Thief never had such issues.
While Gloomwood focuses on stealth, there are no tools that help you with it. In Thief, you could douse torches, cover loud surfaces with moss, toss flash bombs. There is nothing like that in Gloomwood demo. Apparently, the full game will have plenty of cool tools, however.
My bottom line – it’s an honest immersive sim being made by talented people whose hearts are in the right place, who understand the classics. But everything that works in Gloomwood is lifted from the old games, and everything that doesn’t is what’s built on top, or changed.
This is in fact a great compliment not to Gloomwood, but to Thief. While playing this demo in 2021 you realize how well that classic game aged. But if I want to play Thief, why would I play a copy if I can play the actual Thief game that currently appears to be playing better?
I’m sorry if I sound too negative here. Let me repeat again that it’s obvious the full game will be way, way better and more versatile, and would hopefully find its own unique voice. I will definitely buy it and play it, and I wish the team success from the bottom of my heart!
In spite of multiple issues I had with the demo, I had fun playing Gloomwood. It stroke the same chord in me that my beloved Thief games strike, which is an achievement in itself. It was interesting, challenging and at times spooky. Thanks to @TafferKing451 and the team for that!
One last note. I’ve been wondering for a while if tightly budgeted indie teams could proudly carry on the legacy of (somewhat) mainstream immersive sims. Gloomwood might be a very telling answer to this question. https://link.medium.com/oGNSAgbxjdb
Judging by this particular demo, they could not. You need significant budgets not just for production values and shaders, but for storytelling, voice acting, writing, high-quality level and systems design – Gloomwood demo has issues with all of these.
But I won’t be making any conclusions until I play the full game, and some other upcoming indie immersive sims.
