Last week, the long-awaited and much-delayed first-person stealther from Dillon Rogers and David Szymanski (best known for DUSK) crept into Steam Early Access last week, and I was all over it like Thief’s anti-hero Garrett over a dresser brimming with drawers to steal from. Having now played through the Early Access snippet of the game, the ‘Thief with Guns’ moniker is perhaps a bit reductive, it’s more like ‘Grindhouse Thief with Dishonored-like Dismemberment and Souls-Like Level Design.’ I’d call it an Immersive Sim, but that would fly right in the face ofmy recent suggestion to drop that unsexy and confusing label.
Regardless, my description for Gloomwood is a bit of a mouthful, so in the spirit of its ancestor let’s just condense that to say it’s pretty taffin' good.
The Early Access iteration of Gloomwood is set across several industrial-type locales - fisheries, docks, mines - along an aptly gloomy coastline in a steampunky iteration of Victorian England. A distant lighthouse intermittently illuminates the jetty where I stand, making me momentarily visible to the gangly goons patrolling the area, and the whole thing is so thickly atmospheric that I can almost taste the salty air and smell the briny water. Somewhere, I envision a bucket of decapitated fish heads spilled out onto a painfully pebbly beach, being lapped up by the scummy water.
Coming to in some kind of grubby death pit, an untrustworthy voice guides me through a tutorial that entails learning how to crouch (thanks for that) before throwing me into the game proper.
True to that immersive sim [new name pending] spirit, Gloomwood relies on you reading notes and eavesdropping on conversations to figure out what to do next. With a veritable network of vents, wells, shortcuts, and rooftops to traverse, there are plenty of avenues of approach with no clear indication of what exactly it is you’re meant to be approaching. Even the maps are just static diagrams that you find lying around, and need to orient yourself by looking around and figuring out what room you’re in (or just put the map away and completely forget about it, like yours truly). It’s really quite hands-off in guiding you early on, and kind of brilliant for it.
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Once I left the first building (the fishery/human slaughterhouse), it became clearer which way I’m supposed to go, but for that first half-hour or so my lack of orientation amplified the horror. Stumbling between walk-in freezers containing decapitated heads (throwable, of course) and rusted corridors while avoiding the patrolling guards was intense. The dialogue between these growly and depraved eel-eaters is like all those guards chatting with each other in Thief came down with a bad case of laryngitis, grumbling about their grim labour and spluttering their lungs out. It’s exaggerated, it’s grimy, it’s great fun.
Even after I found the blade and the pistol, enemies remain a threat, and it’s clear that the game wants you, at least for this portion, to keep things stealthy. Pistol shots don’t deal much damage, and your health isn’t substantial, so stick to the shadows and stay off those clanging grated metal walkways.
There is no UI in Gloomwood. Want to find out how many rounds left in your revolver? Check the chamber, dummy. Not sure if you’re sufficiently hidden in the shadows? See if the gem in the ring wrapped around your finger is glinting in the light. Everything about the game wants to keep you in there, feeling your way through the darkness, using your survival intuitions or at least unobtrusive mechanics that simulate those intuitions. One of the few visual flourishes to the design is a satisfying glint at the tip of your blade when you hold down the attack button, there to indicate that you’re ready to sneak up behind an enemy and stealth insta-kill them. Despite the stiff death animations (again, very Thief-like), I suspect the satisfaction of getting the jump on enemies and plunging that blade in their backside will never grow old.
True to its ill-defined genre, Gloomwood is immersive, overcoming an intentionally (but nonetheless) blocky and ugly graphics style. While character models and textures don’t look like much, the environments as a whole make a great impression. The simple but effective lighting system, combined with some impressive vistas when you’re looking over the coast towards distant buildings you’re trying to get to, down the rickety walkways of a dauntingly deep mine, or at that lighthouse cutting its line of dangerous light across the sky, give the whole thing a tastefully ominous mood.
After several premature deaths in the fishery, I began to lose hope that I’d make it out of there, but like the good immersive-simmy thing that it is, Gloomwood rewarded me for my fledgling frustrations. I swiped mindlessly at a window leading out onto a rooftop, and it shattered, opening me out onto the grim coastline. From there, navigation became clearer, as looking into the distance I could see a guardpost, a tavern perched on a clifftop, and of course that lighthouse; clearly, all these were places that I should aim to get to.
As I explored the mines (where nasty four-legged surprises await), then snuck into a tavern harbouring some beast that’s not yet ready to be shown in this version of the game, I was impressed by Gloomwood’s level design, its atmosphere, and its clever ramp-ups and releases of tension; walking along the coast between the different the open felt like a linear, welcome break from the mazey nightmares of the buildings themselves. It all just feels very well balanced.
You may get off to a rough start in Gloomwood, especially as the game utilises a checkpointed save system whereby you interact with a gramophone to save your progress. But in that satisfying Resident-Evil-2-slash-Souls kind of way, they actually serve the level design. You get that buildup of tension as you go deeper and deeper into an area, before finding some kind of cleverly placed shortcut that loops you back to your last save point. So forget about save-scumming for that perfect stealth run. If things get a bit bloody and messy here, then you just have to live with it.
With these save points pretty few and far between (usually only one or two to each area), I let off a few howls of anguish into the uncaring mists of the Gloomwood night. While basic axe-wielding grunts are relatively easy to take down, fire-toting ones are unblockable, and the gun chaps are pretty much a death sentence. Enemy AI currently seems a bit too sensitive as well, as peeking around corners seems to trigger their suspicion, and once they’ve spotted you they seem to home in on you even if you’re concealed in the shadows. Conversely, they’re pretty nonplussed when coming upon the corpses of their colleagues or when a door opens right in front of them, so it all balances out in a slightly janky kind of way.
These niggles will almost certainly be ironed out in Early Access, but combined with that stern save system, this Early Access slice of the game can be a bit punishing at times. Despite that, it’s a promising take on a cerebral style of stealth game, shrouded in a crepuscular atmosphere that’s spooky, yet oddly comforting to veterans of the games this was inspired by.
With the shotgun making an appearance late in the demo and making it rather easy to tear through enemies I’d desperately been avoiding up to that point, I do hope that Gloomwood doesn’t lean too far into becoming a shooter in its as yet unrevealed chapters. After all, ‘Thief with Guns’ sounds cool, but one gun too many and suddenly it’s not really Thief at all. Clearly, Gloomwood has its own identity that it’s striving for too, but I hope it holds onto those stealthy foundations as it evolves over the coming year or two.
