GYLT EATS MOVIE
GYLT EATS FULL

It carries the playful ghoulishness of Beetlejuice, never to be confused for something sinister, but mysterious and enchanting. The soundtrack is the pitch-perfect accompaniment to Gylt’s adolescent horror tale, and it was the first indication that I was not to expect an adult tone. If you like stuff like Coraline or ParaNorman, you’ll find GYLT is familiar visually as it is in its gameplay, but in this instance it feels more commendable. Tequila Works shows off in Gylt’s setting, with a neon-lit arcade and an eerie gymnasium standing out as two especially memorable areas that look fantastic and pack just the right amount of creepiness to complement the tone. Textures blur the line between photo-realism and cartoon while colors pop when they’re meant to, though it’s also a frequently dark game. Gylt’s best feature after its tone is its visual style, whose funhouse mirror proportionality is instantly reminiscent of most computer-generated movies from the past 25 years. Likening the game even more to an introductory-level horror, the roundabout traversal feels plucked right out of the genre greats – find a key to open a door which grants you an item to backtrack to a previous door inside of which you’ll find a chest with another item which allows you to move on to a combat area after which you find a bird-shaped crest that you can plug into a door you saw an hour ago.

Sally spends most of her time crouched behind crates waiting for a nearby monster to look the other way for precisely the six seconds she needs to advance to the next shadow. At worst, it’s totally void of new ideas when it comes to how players actually interact with it.

GYLT EATS MOVIE

From its puzzles made alternatingly of wires and valves that need spinning to enemies whose patrols encompass only the same 20 feet of space on a loop, Gylt is at best a charmingly typical experience, like the kind of stealth-action puzzle-platformer mash-up movie tie-in we hardly see anymore. Gylt’s tone and world go a long way to make up for the game’s totally familiar gameplay experience. Its T rating by the ESRB comes mostly by way of some foul language scribbled on the walls of the town, but the horrors themselves feel more like Pixar After Dark than true survival-horror fare, and that’s totally fine, because it’s clearly the vision Tequila Works had for Gylt and it delivers on it with precision. Gylt is thematically dark, but never pushes the envelope too far. The central mystery is a fun one and captures the Laika-like spirit of the project perfectly. For six or seven gameplay hours, Sally will be one step behind her troubled cousin, desperate for answers. Her younger cousin Emily has been missing for a month, and the search for her drives Sally to dig deeper into the history of the town as well as her relationship with Emily. As the middle school-aged Sally, players find themselves in her home of Bethelwood, a once quaint mining town now playing host to brutish monsters of various shapes and sizes. Gylt is a horror game, but that’s not to say it’s likely to be a scary game. It's still unclear how well Stadia will work with anything less than gigabit internet speeds (sorry, gamers with data caps) and Gylt's final quality isn't guaranteed, but signing on a small developer with a solid track record to develop a charming exclusive for their debut console may be a good sign of things to come.Platform(s): Google Stadia Baby’s first Silent Hill Though a subscription-based, game-streaming service like Stadia sounds a bit terrifying on its face, Google's embrace of an indie studio looking to scare the socks off of players in the traditional manner should restore at least a small sliver of the gaming community's faith in the product. Nevertheless, the trailer looks equally compelling in terms of premise and appearance, so it can only be hoped that the final product ultimately resembles what potential Stadia owners will get when (or if) they get their hands on it.

GYLT EATS FULL

Gylt's June 6 announcement coincided with the long-awaited reveal of Google Stadia's pricing and subscription details, giving early adopters something to look forward to until more studios come aboard. Though the game has strong artistic direction, the lesser specs and mobile-friendly nature of Stadia will doubtlessly be holding Tequila Studios back from allowing Gylt to reach its full technical potential.

Gylt eats