Gloomy Eyes

My first impression of Gloomy Eyes was that someone had lovingly committed a Tim Burton film to interactive form and dared you to complain about it. The diorama stages are the star of the show: handcrafted, rotatable miniature worlds stuffed with luminescent mushrooms, vivid toxic swamps, and shadows that only Gloomy's yellow eyes pierce. The art direction was originally built for a VR short film that won best VR movie at Annecy in 2019, and you can feel that cinematic origin in every carefully lit corner. Porting a mood piece into a playable game is genuinely hard, and the team at Atlas V, Fishing Cactus, and partners got the atmosphere almost exactly right. The self-coop mechanic sits at the centre of everything. You play as Gloomy, a zombie boy who can hurl rocks, smash light sources, and push heavy objects, but who dissolves under strong light. Then you swap to Nena, the nimble human girl who can climb marked paths, sneak past guards, pick pockets, and operate machinery, but who crumbles if any of the shuffling undead get too close. The fourteen chapters ask you to juggle both sets of rules in your head simultaneously, which produces some genuinely satisfying puzzle moments, particularly when you realise you need to use Gloomy to kill a light source so Nena can cross a room she previously could not enter. There are also a handful of stealth sections and late-game action sequences, including an arena fight that leads into a final showdown. None of it is especially demanding, but the variety keeps the pacing alive. Where the game earns real credit is in its soundscape. Colin Farrell narrates in a voice that sounds like someone telling a bedtime story at two in the morning, and it gives the whole experience a peculiar intimacy. The soundtrack sits quietly behind the puzzles rather than swelling theatrically, which divides opinion but felt right to me for a game this contemplative. The two protagonists never speak to each other directly, communicating only through animation and the narrator's framing, and that restraint actually deepens their bond. The idle animations alone show the level of craft at work here. That said, the honest case against Gloomy Eyes is short but real. The puzzle design plateaus early and never meaningfully escalates across its runtime of roughly five to six hours. Switching between characters to backtrack through sections you have already solved is occasionally a chore rather than a revelation. There are minor bugs, including a character-swapping glitch when Gloomy takes damage without dying, and some players will feel the checkpointing is too spread out for a game this unhurried. The narration occasionally over-explains themes that the visuals were already communicating perfectly. And the ending arrives more abruptly than the journey deserves. Who is this for? Honestly, it is for people who find Little Nightmares too tense, who want a puzzle-adventure that prioritises atmosphere over mechanical complexity, and who have any warmth at all toward stop-motion aesthetics or gothic children's stories. If you need a brain-melting puzzle game, look elsewhere. If you want two cozy evenings inside a living diorama with a melancholy heart and a narrator who sounds genuinely invested in whether Gloomy and Nena find the sun, this one earns its place.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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