This Ghostly-Charming Brain-Teaser Serves as the Ideal Alternative to Halloween Horror

Not all spooky season experience must scare you. Starting with beloved classics for example Scooby-Doo to endearing shows including Over the Garden Wall, plenty of spooky-season staples offer entertainment without causing fear. Additionally, a growing library of eerie-charming games including autumn atmosphere, but not the keep-you-awake degree of terror. Gloomy Eyes debuted in the fall, and serves as an superb comfortable choice to the truly terrifying titles of this year.

A Distinctive Single-Player Cooperative Adventure

Labeled as a solo collaboration brain-teaser, Gloomy Eyes teams up a undead youth called Gloomy and a living girl called Nena as they embark on an quest to return daylight to their shadowy environment. They look resembles Funko Pops combined with the puppets from a stop-motion animation. Their pale-skinned and baggy-eyed aesthetic draws inspiration from the appearance of Tim Burton’s films, and the story is a quintessential suitable for everyone tale. These two develops an enduring connection over the course of the game’s numerous levels as Nena attempts to show to her clerical relative that, hey, perhaps the undead are actually good.

Creative Puzzle Mechanics

This unique label originates from the game’s interactive problem-solving. When Gloomy and Nena cross paths, you’ll swap among the newfound friends to solve puzzles and advance through the stages. Being a zombie, Gloomy cannot pass through the light of a streetlight, while Nena can be captured by wandering undead unless a light is directed on them.

It's necessary for them to work in tandem — in practice, gamers operate them simultaneously — to complete stages. Nena may move or briefly disable lamps to create passages for Gloomy, while the open-brained youth will utilize his supernatural ability to move objects in the surroundings, revealing routes for Nena.

Immersive World Building

The puzzles evoke memories a touch of The Gardens Between, in the fashion the levels are floating, diorama-like designs that the perspective moves across in sync with your heroes. Gloomy Eyes’ worlds are highly entertaining, taking the friends around a amusement park and through a ghostly building, amid other places. There’s a “diorama view” button that allows you to pull back and rotate the areas, both to admire the designs and look for ways that may not have been clear.

Slight Issues and Overall Experience

Here lies one of the few hiccups with Gloomy Eyes. Like other releases with a fixed perspective, sometimes it's unclear where the protagonists are able to move. You may need to simply collide with a few random objects to determine which ones are interactable, as it’s not always intuitive.

However, those small obstacles don’t get in the way of a ghostly-charming fun adventure. Gloomy Eyes is relatively brief, with roughly a few sessions worth of brain-teasers. Advanced areas blend together minor stealth and dynamic sequences with the challenge completion, as Gloomy Eyes marches toward a fulfilling — and moderately surprising — conclusion.

Availability and Conclusion

Those avoiding the scares of fear-inducing releases won’t want to miss Gloomy Eyes. It’s available on Switch console, Sony system, PC, and Xbox, and is available at a reduced price for a discount on digital platforms.

Gloomy Eyes is out now on several consoles and provides a pleasurable option for gamers in search of Halloween fun minus the intense scares.