Earthworms

I have a soft spot for small games that smell like they were made at 2 a.m. by someone who loves Twin Peaks a little too much, and Earthworms is almost aggressively that thing. You step into the trenchcoat of Daniel White, a psychic private detective who gets called to a fog-soaked fishing village to find a missing girl, and what starts as a noir mystery quietly dissolves into surrealist science fiction involving tentacled earthworms, dimensional portals, and a Stalin lookalike with an ultimatum. The tonal lurch from cozy coastal whodunit to cosmic weirdness is either this game's greatest quality or its most baffling flaw - honestly, it is both. The art is where All Those Moments earns the most goodwill. Every one of the 34 hand-painted locations is drawn in a style clearly inspired by Edward Hopper, and the effect is striking: landscapes that feel like oil paintings left in the sun, shimmering rather than animating, with a color palette that sits somewhere between calming and deeply wrong. Characters move like paper-puppet cutouts, which some people will find charming and others will find lifeless. I landed closer to charmed. The soundtrack by Piotr Surmacz is the real revelation - genuinely unsettling without being aggressive, a low-frequency ambiance that does more atmospheric work per minute than most big-budget horror games manage across their entire runtime. As a point-and-click, it plays like a respectful student of the 90s classics - inventory collection, item combination, and the occasional puzzle that will have you cycling every object in your bag against every hotspot in the room. Daniel's psychic visions act as a soft hint system, linking people and objects across scenes, and when they fire correctly they feel elegant. When they don't appear - and there are puzzles where they really should - you are left with pure moon logic and the mute stare of the internet walkthrough. The game has three endings (good, neutral, bad) gated behind quiet choices scattered through the run, which adds modest replay value, but with a runtime of two to four hours depending on how stuck you get, a second visit is a low commitment anyway. The English translation drifts into awkward phrasing at times, which feels like a bug but honestly reads like a feature once the story gets weird enough. This is not a polished game. Narrative consistency wobbles - a character detail introduced early quietly disappears when inconvenient - and some players have reported save-related bugs, though the developer has been responsive in patching. Steam user sentiment sits at roughly 79% positive across a small sample, which feels accurate. It is a game with cracks. But underneath those cracks is something genuinely handcrafted, with a soundscape and visual identity that a much larger studio would struggle to replicate. For the kind of person who reads that Twin Peaks meets Donnie Darko pitch and feels something stir, this is absolutely worth a few quiet hours.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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