“Gloomwood” Early Access: First Impressions
Since the release of “Dusk” back in 2018, New Blood Interactive has been at the forefront at revitalizing retro-style first-person shooter games—a genre affectionately referred to as “boomer shooters” by fans. Rather than prioritizing advanced graphics and active multiplayer, these games seek to emulate the look and feel of 90s classics such as “Quake”, “Doom”, and “Half-Life”. However, New Blood Interactive’s newest title “Gloomwood” takes an entirely different direction.
While New Blood Interactive’s previous titles like “Dusk” and “Amid Evil” focused on fast-paced action and shooting, “Gloomwood” advertises itself as a homage to classic stealth games such as “Thief” and “Deus Ex”. In contrast to their more action-oriented counterparts, these first-person stealth games focus more on attention to surroundings, clever use of limited resources, and duping enemies.
When “Gloomwood” was first unveiled alongside a playable demo back in 2020, fans hyped it up as a revival for the first-person stealth genre. And after two years of waiting, Gloomwood (mostly) lives up to expectations.
Currently, the game is still in early access which means that the majority of the game is still incomplete. For now, “Gloomwood” only offers 2-3 hours of gameplay, but what it manages to accomplish in that short time frame is impressive.
What makes “Gloomwood” unique alongside other stealth games is its use of diegetic clues to give players information. Rather than having distracting UI (user interface) elements such as a health bar or ammo indicator, “Gloomwood” has visual cues that let a player know when they’re low on health, visible to enemies, or short on ammo.
One of the most clever examples of this is the game’s use of a diamond ring to indicate whether or not your character is visible to enemies. When the ring is shining and visible, you’re in the light and vulnerable to be spotted by enemies. However, when the ring is obscured by shadow, you’re completely in the dark and invisible to enemies.
All this serves to make “Gloomwood” and its world immersive despite its primitive graphics. What the game lacks in polygons, it makes up for in graphical clarity and a great artstyle.
Throughout the level, a creepy, Victorian city looms as a silhouette in the background, beckoning you to arrive. Enemies have glowing eyes that tell you how alert they are depending on the glow’s color. Even in pitch black darkness, you can tell where enemies are from this alone.
Sound design is also excellent. Footsteps, weapons, doors, fire, and fragile objects all have a loud distinct sound that contrasts with the ambience and gives players a sense of where things are and whether or not enemies will hear them. Checkpoints are represented by a gramophone that plays a soothing melody giving off a sense of relief.
While “Gloomwood” is an overall great experience, there’s still some glaring issues that need to be fixed. One is the difficulty. Rather than having clever, hard-hitting enemies with great AI, “Gloomwood”’s difficulty relies heavily on the fact that saving is limited. Checkpoints are scarce and dying will often cause you to lose a significant amount of progress.
However, the number of times you die will probably be minimal due to how easy it is to exploit the game’s enemy AI. Enemies give up almost instantly once they lose sight of you, and they only take a few shots to kill. I would rather deal with stronger, more durable enemies and have abundant saves rather than breeze through braindead enemies only to be sent back after making one small mistake.
Although the lighting is often used to great effect in “Gloomwood”, sometimes the darkness of the game’s environments makes it difficult to know where to go. In smaller areas, this isn’t a problem, but when the game reveals its bigger, more open areas, it’s fairly easy to get lost because of the darkness.
Despite enjoying “Gloomwood”, I can’t recommend buying it just yet because of one prominent issue: the game’s length. As someone who’s fairly bad at stealth games, I was able to beat the game in 3 hours, and for a more skilled player, it shouldn’t take more than an hour to complete.
If you’re a fan of New Blood Interactive or the “Thief” series, you’ll probably love Gloomwood and will have no problem spending 20 dollars on it. New Blood Interactive has a great track record, and I believe that the finished product will be great. However, for casual players, it’ll probably be the better choice to wait till the game is in a more complete state to buy it.