![]() ![]() Whenever you’re running around quickly, you become painfully aware of how loud you’re being, and it helps encourage the player to slowly creep around enemies. Speaking of audio, I initially thought the sound design for Sally’s footsteps was maybe a little too loud or out of sync while she was running, but as soon as the monsters entered the story, this felt more like a feature than a bug. It’s sinister enough to really help with the illusion that Gylt has more of an edge than it actually does. The game also sounds good, as Chris Velasco’s score brings an appropriate amount of whimsy and terror. Illustrated images are used in the place of cutscenes, and this economic decision leads to something that gives the game a bit of a storybook feel. ![]() Everything from the characters to the monsters to the locations feels like something from a Laika film but with a little less exaggeration. I was surprised by how good Gylt looks, and it’s an example of how a reliable art style can visually set an indie game above a AAA title with state-of-the-art graphics. As much as the story can feel familiar and predictable, at its core, it still has an important message about how standing on the sidelines while someone is attacked and humiliated can be just as bad as taking part in it. As Sally gets closer and closer to reuniting with Emily, she realizes that even though she didn’t directly bully Emily, she’s still complicit because she never stood up for her. It’s a pretty simple story about Sally, a young girl who goes looking for her cousin, Emily, and stumbles into a supernatural realm where all of Emily’s fears and insecurities about being bullied are transformed into monstrous forms. While there are a lot of other indie horror games being released in that T-rated sweet spot, Gylt feels unique in that it’s a self-contained story that doesn’t feel like it’s designed to set up a franchise or launch a line of merchandise (this type of game is so common that they literally made a TV Tropes page for it). No, it didn’t click for me that Gylt is aimed more at children until I noticed that the graffiti in the school contained relatively tame and juvenile messages like “Snot!!” and “We want winners, not wee-nerds.” Suddenly, everything came together: the relatively simple gameplay, the narrative’s ever-present themes of bullying, the reliance on dread over graphic violence for scares (one jumpscare got me good…) I respected Gylt a lot more once I saw it for what it was: a stepping stone for youngsters who are curious about survival horror games but also probably shouldn’t be thrown into the deep end. At first, I didn’t really get the point of a watered-down version of The Last of Us until I came to a realization Gylt isn’t for people who can or should play The Last of Us.įor some reason, the absence of blood and the monsters being more of a “Henry Sellick” level of creepy didn’t clue me into this. You even go around consuming random discarded medications to regain health, though this time, it’s inhalers rather than pills. The gameplay also felt very familiar, as it has you sneaking around monsters and scrounging up scarce resources to potentially kill them, just like a more simplistic version of The Last of Us. It wasn’t necessarily “bad”, but the plot about a young girl searching for her cousin in a weird, spooky version of a familiar location felt a bit too Stranger Things (yeah, I know the irony of saying something is derivative of Stranger Things when Stranger Things is purposefully derivative of a lot of other things). In the first few minutes, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Gylt. But earlier this month, Gylt was re-released on PC and consoles, and I got to check out the PlayStation 5 version. The title was originally released as a Stadia exclusive back in 2019, and was briefly not available anywhere after Stadia was shut down in 2023. I recently wrote about the gradual destruction of media at the hands of big companies, so it’s interesting to review a game like Gylt, because it was actually saved from being unplayable. ![]()
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