Gylt gives off a real Stranger Things vibe in that it is certainly a horror game, but it’s not so overly scary that it would turn away kids or those who typically can’t handle horror games. It still has a few good jump scares, but otherwise it’s fairly tame for the genre.
Gylt’s art style also lends itself well to the “horror for kids” atmosphere it cultivates, using cartoonish visuals instead of realistic graphics. Gylt’s art style, graphics, and lighting all come together to showcase one of Stadia’s most visually impressive games. Gylt looks and runs great, with a smooth frame rate that’s only ever undermined by the Stadia service itself if players decide to play on wi-fi instead of a wired connection. All things considered, Gylt is quite easily the best-looking and most-polished title from Tequila Works to date.
Players explore Gylt’s visually-striking world as a young girl named Sally who is looking for her missing cousin Emily. The game starts with Sally hanging up missing posters for Emily in the “real” world, but she is soon chased by some bullies into a twisted, Silent Hill-style version of her hometown, complete with giant eyeballs and deadly monsters. The monster designs in Gylt are creative and creepy, with Sally stalked by blobby fish people with upside-down heads, teleporting monsters with bird beaks, and even a massive humanoid creature whose consistently one of the most impressive sights in the entire game whenever it shows up.
Instead of fighting these monsters head on, Gylt encourages players to take the stealthy route. Much of Gylt’s gameplay revolves around pretty basic stealth sequences, where players can throw pop cans to distract enemies, sneak up behind them for instant-kills, and generally just try to avoid being caught. It’s serviceable, though the stealth sequences are elevated significantly by the game’s haunting musical score, which does a great job of heightening the tension.
When Sally isn’t sneaking around monsters, she’s solving standard survival-horror puzzles that we’ve seen countless times before, exploring spooky areas, collecting keys, and contending with “limited ammo,” like in most survival-horror games. However, Gylt is one of the easiest “survival-horror” games that we’ve played, and really players won’t have to think too hard to solve its puzzles and will have to go out of their way to die.
As the game progresses, Gylt equips Sally with some weaponry that she can use to pretty effectively fight off the monsters, including a fire extinguisher that freezes them and a special flashlight that can be used to outright kill them. Things can get hairy when Sally gets surrounded by a bunch of monsters at once, but otherwise these items make the game so easy that players can basically ignore most of the stealth sections after they’re acquired. There are some mannequins introduced at one point (ever since 2005’s Condemned: Criminal Origins, mannequins appear to be a requirement in horror games) that are threatening and actually scary at first, but Sally soon gets a weapon that renders them completely toothless.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of enemies players encounter in Gylt are complete pushovers, and this extends to the boss fights. The boss fights in the game are repetitive as players have to contend with the same enemies multiple times, and they’re not all that exciting or challenging. The boss fights, like the rest of the gameplay, are like the most basic versions of boss battles from other games. There’s a fire enemy that players have to trick into charging into water, for example, which is something that has been done countless times before.
Gylt’s gameplay is highly derivative of games that have come before, but there is a bit more originality to be had in the story. The cut-scenes are lame motion comics that don’t even match the great art style seen in the game itself, but the voice acting is done well enough that the scenes still carry emotional weight and the story told is a surprisingly dark one with a really dark ending if players fail to find a certain number of collectibles.
Finding collectibles is one of the only ways that Gylt manages to muster up any replay value, and there are a few different ones to find. There are some that are important to possibly changing the game’s ending, and there are others that are there to expand on the story, in the form of books. Most of these books aren’t that compelling of a read, but there are a couple that are legitimately creepy, and one that appears to be a reference to the infamous Resident Evil “itchy, tasty” file.
When players beat Gylt, they can jump back in and look for collectibles that they may have missed the first time through. In our first playthrough, there were definitely areas that we were unable to reach, and we do feel compelled to return to the game and go exploring. Even so, we imagine that it will still take just about five hours total to see absolutely everything in Gylt, so anyone that gets this game should keep in mind that it’s a very short experience.
Going back in search of collectibles is somewhat hampered by a bug that marks things on the map that aren’t actually there. This doesn’t do much besides just waste a bit of time, but exploring for missing items is made slightly annoying by this issue. We also ran into an issue where an enemy awareness icon would appear in rooms where there weren’t any enemies, but otherwise we didn’t encounter many technical issues in our time with the game.
Despite its short length and occasional technical hiccups, Gylt is an OK stealth-horror game with knockout visuals and great audio design. It’s not nearly compelling enough to sell someone on the Stadia service, but those with the platform wanting to check out something original will likely have a good time with it as long as they don’t go in expecting the game to be Stadia’s killer app or anything like that.
Gylt is out now, exclusively for Google Stadia.
