Gloom(wood) and Doom

Gloomwood, one of those games I always heard about but never played until the last Steam Nextfest.

I loved it!

Wonderfully atmospheric, obscenely tense, great to control, and wonderfully paced.

It's a game I'm looking forward to playing more of the near future, and wish all of its developers the best in terms of their release, and their future.

But it's not what people say kept saying it is.

Perhaps for simplicity, or because of its over similarities, outlets would constantly label this game as a successor to the beloved Thief series.

"Thief With Guns" is the elevator pitch.

And… I do understand.

When you first play this game, anybody familiar with the old Thief games could almost be convinced it's a mod, if it weren't for the fact this game's movement doesn't make you feel like a lubricated fridge.

However, it's got the same style of lean, momentum, unlocking, collecting, throwing, and best of all, grabbing and vaulting with the spacebar, a mechanic I really wish more traversal and open-world games would steal.

Now me saying this game isn't Thief, sounds a bit like saying a game isn't Half Life, even though it has the same animations, graphics, guns, physics, and sounds.

For Gloomwood though, while it's got all of Thief's feel in terms of player control and ability, all of its recontextualized.

The original Thief had quite a troubled development, mainly stemming from the development team being unsure of what it even was supposed to be.

The name didn't come right away, original it was just called "The Dark Project", jumping between a Tomb Raider, Dungeon Crawler, and Zombie game, before finally settling on being a stealth game months before release.

As a result, Thief's occasional Survival Horror Levels really pale in comparison to the likes of Silent Hill and Resident Evil due to the gameplay not really focusing on that style.

Gloomwood is Thief, as a Survival Horror game.

It uses stealth but not for the thrill of infiltrating past enemies inches away to pick their pockets and horde a chests worth of gold, but to setup the prefect scenario where your two only shotgun shells will manage to clear one hallway of enemies.

It's honestly a feeling I haven't really witnessed since Resident Evil 3 Remake which subtly retooled Resident Evil 2 Remake's survival horror gameplay into an action-rampage.

I know a lot of people disliked that game, and maybe people would've disliked Gloomwood had it been released in 2002 as a Thief Expansion Pack, but personally, I really love it when games reuse existing systems to generate something completely different.

In the same way a Director's Cut can completely alter the perception of a movie with just a handful of changes, the same goes for game development.

There's so many games from the 90s which haven't had their gameplay iterated upon, not even in their own series.

Thief was very much one of these.

While I personally loved Thief: Deadly Shadows, there's no question the instant you boot it up that the new engine and scale of levels makes it feel notably different form the previous games, which the industry abandoned completely.

Just now, we're getting iterations of Tomb Raider, Driver, Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, all these games which might've had a couple spiritual successors though most of the time, those games did one of two things…

Copied the original's formula to the point of borderline irrelevance, or "modernized" it to make it palatable to the modern Triple A market.

Gloomwood's a game which always could've happened, yet didn't, until those who grew up with Thief became old enough and experienced enough to make it.

On the one hand, it's really awesome that people can make the games they dreamed of growing up. On the other hand, it's kind of depressing that millions of dollars and thousands of people couldn’t make that happen before then.