When I purchased the Founder’s Edition of Google’s Stadia one of the titles I was most excited about was “Gylt,” a Stadia exclusive launch title from the Madrid-based Tequila Works that was teased ahead of Google’s E3 2019 Stadia presentation. Despite my excitement about the game, I was underwhelmed by Stadia as a whole and never wound up purchasing the game. That is until this month when the game was released for free as part of my Stadia Pro subscription.
“Gylt” is a horror game, that feels like a cross between “Silent Hill” and “Luigi’s Mansion.” The game has gorgeous, immersive, realistic environments with plenty of scare factor, while the characters and monsters are more cartoony. It brings a nice balance to the game that makes it fun for adults but also a perfect gateway horror title for younger players.
In “Gylt” you play as Sally, a young girl in search of her cousin Emily. You start the game posting missing posters around your hometown of Bethelwood before being chased away by a group of bullies. During the chase, you fall into a ditch and in an attempt to find a way home wind up in a nightmarish alternate reality where you quickly discover your cousin now resides.
Gylt’s gameplay mixes action, stealth, and environmental puzzles with an emphasis on stealth, as you’ll spend most of the game crouched in the shadows or behind objects trying to evade the nightmarish creatures that roam the town. You can distract the monsters with a tactfully thrown soda can, or if you’re feeling brave you can take the monsters on head-on with your handy flashlight, or later in the game a fire extinguisher. Though combat really isn’t the focus here and you only have to fight a couple of times in the game.
The puzzles are easy enough and will feel familiar for those who have played games in the genre previously. Most of the puzzles revolve around finding a missing piece, leveraging the tools in your arsenal to get past obstacles, or re-wiring circuits to unlock things. Only a couple of the later puzzles initially stumped me in the game, for the most part, the solutions are fairly straightforward.
Though the main focus of the game is on “rescuing” your cousin, you’ll uncover a number of other mysteries along the way through a series of books hidden throughout the game. Each book is a journal entry that explores a number of the game’s subplots, including the events that lead to Emily’s disappearance and the dark past of the town of Bethelwood. A past full of horror game tropes that include things like a mine accident, Native Americans, and the like.
Scares in this game are limited with most of the spook factor tied into the atmosphere and the game’s score. I can recall two specific jump scare attempts in the game and only one actually got me. It was really well executed because there is really no way to see it coming, and is a nice “gotcha” moment from the developers.
The one element I wish had been more of a focus by the developers was the emotional element. The throughline of the entire game is bullying. In fact, the game opens with a disclaimer about bullying. Its what sets you on your path in the game and you ultimately discover it plays a part in Emily’s disappearance. It is represented visually throughout the game in the form of insults scrawled on walls and mannequins recreating student pranks like tripping a kid in the lunchroom or harassing a kid in the locker room. The visual representation, especially with the mannequins was so powerful I wish they had found a way to convey that emotion through the game’s storyline and dialogue because I don’t feel that it ever really connects. As the story unfolds, sure, you feel a little bad for Emily and Sally’s dialogue suggests you should feel sorry for her too, but it just never really connected with me emotionally.
Even in the end, when you have to make a major decision to complete the game I didn’t have enough emotional connection to the characters to choose one way or another and I ultimately chose just based on what was the “right thing to do” rather than because I cared for the characters or the outcome. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by games like “Life Is Strange” that are heavy on the emotion, but I just feel like a stronger emotional element could have really elevated the narrative of the game.
Lack of emotional connection aside, I really enjoyed “Gylt,” so much so that I am leveraging the “Return to Campus” feature in the game to go back and find the remaining books, photographs, and other items I missed during the first playthrough just so I can get a complete view of some of the game’s subplots. If you have Google Stadia I highly recommend checking out this title, especially this month while its free with Pro.
If you don’t have Stadia, keep an eye out for this game as I saw rumors that “Gylt” would eventually be making its way to other platforms.
