In Gloomwood—the Thief-inspired stealth-action survival horror shooter by New Blood Interactive—you play as a doctor. In the game’s opening moments you awaken, hazy, on a floor covered with meat. It compresses grossly and softly beneath your feet, masking your footfalls. The place you have found yourself in is very sick. Masked, poorly armed but deadly guards wander the halls, caves, and lightly forested coast of Gloomwood, coughing and wheezing through their respirators. Corpses litter the place. Some bloody, others covered in bile. And so, you do what a doctor is supposed to do: diagnose and treat the illness. It just so happens that, in Gloomwood, you go about treating that illness with a cane sword and handgun.
The game, which just entered early access, has been pitched by developers, influencers, and journalists alike as “Thief with guns.” Since its release in 1997, Thief has been a gold-standard for first-person stealth. Its clear, light based sneaking mechanics, excellent level design, and distinctive, terrible combat have cemented it in the minds of many as the quintessential stealth game. One that other developers have been chasing for years..
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Gloomwood’s Thief DNA is obvious; guards are hearty and hit hard, you move slowly by default and slower when you mask your footsteps, and the game begins with you finding a ring that indicates how well lit (and vulnerable) you are. It even uses a similar early 3D aesthetic to the original Thief, which has become something of a signature for New Blood Interactive. The levels are relatively large, with half-a-dozen routes through just about every part of the map. Routes you become intimately familiar with if you, like me, didn’t manage to find a revolver for three hours.
In an early part of the first level there is a loft office with a safe, some lore, and a handful of resources. The office is connected to the rest of the facility by a locked door connected to the building’s central stairway, a closed window onto the roof, a chain which runs from the ground floor to the office through a boarded up entrance, and a wall which can be climbed by stacking boxes from the other side of the room. In a lesser game, this would be empty player expression for player expression’s sake. “You can tackle this problem in any way,” the game would remind you, before presenting you with identical outcomes for each approach. This would be novel, for a while, until the artifice of the level design set in.
Gloomwood deftly evades this fate by making your approach to the office tactically interesting. The room is connected to every other part of the building, and gaining access through one route doesn’t guarantee being able to use the others. For example, I got into the office by stacking boxes and quickly looted the room. I wanted easy access to the roof, so I decided to break a window and climb out onto the balcony. The sound of the window alerted three guards, who ran to the locked door, which they then beat down with an axe before shooting me with a shotgun. I was dead, sure, but I had a plan. Those guards had to be protecting something important.
On my next attempt, I broke the wooden boards separating the chains from the building’s ground floor and climbed into the office. This secured me an escape route for when things would, almost inevitably, go wrong. Climbing onto the roof while being chased by three guards would lead to my being shot in the back, as would hopping down into the open, coverless room below. The utility shaft, however, provided ample cover and the ability to break line of sight. I flicked a light switch, bathed the room in nearly impenetrable dark, broke the window, and then tucked myself into a secluded corner of the room.
The guards rushed the room, shattered the door, and began stumbling around in the dark, looking for me. I managed to quietly stab one of them in the back when he made the mistake of investigating my little corner, then tried to approach the second of the three enemies. I managed to catch him off guard, killing him quickly, but was seen by the third, shotgun wielding guard. He fired, grazing me. I quickly scrambled down the chain, and into the secluded hallway below. I looped around to the cargo room, over which the office is lofted, and climbed the boxes I had stacked earlier. The guard, believing I had hidden somewhere in the office, kept searching for me, leaving his back exposed to the cargo hold below, which I then stabbed. My plan had worked (almost) flawlessly, removing three guards from the building, giving me not one, but three escape routes, and granting me easy access to the central stairway.
If the small slice of the game currently available in early access is to be believed, then Gloomwood’s level design isn’t just good—it’s exceptional. I managed to take out three guards at once without a firearm (which I had, somehow, missed). Gloomwood is not just a Thief game with guns, it is an excellent Thief game (with guns).
This isn’t to undersell how those guns play into the game’s design, though. Many hardcore stealth games share a fundamental flaw: they become absolutely miserable the moment you’re spotted. Enemies hit hard, your player character is designed to feel weak (encouraging stealth) and, oftentimes, you aren’t given many movement tools in order to make the sneaking more intense. More action and ability focused stealth games, like Dishonored, alleviate this by giving players tools to end fights fast and messy before returning to the shadows, but this leads them to quickly develop into wizard-murder power fantasies instead of real stealth games where, sometimes, you’re forced to fight.
Gloomwood solves this problem by transforming into a survival horror game the moment you’re spotted. Your character moves slowly enough that attempting to outrun a shotgun, axe, or torch wielding guard will likely result in your sudden demise. Instead, you can try to stand and fight. Like many survival horror games, individual, melee-focused enemies can be handled through clever movement and sharp knifework, saving your precious ammo. Groups of enemies, however, are a death sentence in melee. This forces you to rely on your firearms (assuming you found them).
On Full-Moon difficulty ammo is scarce, healing items scarcer (and less effective), and your enemies take three revolver shots to kill. I managed to accumulate 30 rounds of ammunition in the game’s first two areas, before circling back to actually find a pistol. That is 10 guards worth of bullets. There are several dozen guards (and murderous dogs) across the game’s first three locations. This ammo balance felt just about perfect, because I had a large enough ammo stockpile to avoid my resource hoarding instincts, while having enough of an ammo deficit that firing my pistol felt like a last resort.
Gloomwood, like many stealth and survival horror games, rarely managed to actually frighten me. It did, however, manage to put me under tension, which, for me, is better. It would’ve been commendable for New Blood Interactive to make a great Thief spiritual successor. It would’ve been commendable for them to make a well balanced first-person survival horror game, too. That they have managed to do both is a real accomplishment, one I’m excited to see grow over the next few months.
