izigame.me

My Experience
Although I remember seeing something about this game back when it released on Stadia, I really didn't pay very much attention to it. At long last, following Orcs Must Die 3 (another Stadia exclusive that I didn't get to until much later), Gylt has finally arrived on Steam. And it's pretty good!
I tend to enjoy most stealth games, so perhaps I'm already the target audience for this type of thing. As usual in stealth games, your protagonist Sally can hide in shadows and distract enemies. Taking on many enemies at once is a bad idea. The enemy awareness meter, although simple, is sufficient.
The game has this cool Alan Wake-style light vs. dark thing going on, where Sally has a flashlight that she can focus to "burn" 2-3 particular spots on an enemy to dispatch them. She also has a "flash" that recharges over time that she can use to stun enemies. She can also jam the flashlight into the backs of most enemies to instantly destroy them. However, both her flashlight executions and flashlight focus eat a lot of battery power. Luckily, there are batteries absolutely everywhere, and the ones that you don't pick up are marked on your map. An odd aspect here is the game's insistence on telling you exactly what you can do with batteries (and inhalers) do every single time you pick them up. You'll get quite a bit of exposure to these tooltips.
The aforementioned inhalers heal Sally, and these are also all over the place (and marked on your map). I'm not even sure I can recall a time when I had less than four inhalers (Sally can carry a maximum of five). Although the batteries and inhalers could have introduced a bit of a survival horror aspect to the game, Gylt just isn't difficult enough to create this tension in the player. What's odd here is that you later get a fire extinguisher that, although it requires time to recharge, never actually runs out of whatever compound is inside. This can be used not only to extinguish fires (duh), but can also help you solve puzzles, navigate through steam leaks, and freeze enemies!
Don't get me wrong - there's still a lot to enjoy here. I thought the shadow version of Bethelwood and the school environments were compelling and lovingly crafted, and I enjoyed this "Silent Hill 2 for kids" vibe that the game had going on. The game is ostensibly about the bullying of Sally's little cousin Emily, and the enemies say amusing things like "I smell loser!" to drive this point home. Certain doors are also locked with these eyeball stalks that follow Sally around, which seem to echo Emily's feeling that everyone is always looking at her/judging her.
Another aspect of the game that I loved were the "inhabitants." From time to time, Sally will locate a ball of something called "blood quartz." She can use this blood quartz, one for one, to free individuals in the shadow town that have been turned to stone. These individuals have been trapped in the town, and upon their release Sally is rewarded with a diary entry that explains the circumstances that led to their gorgon-ification.
Unfortunately, this brings me to the aspect of the game that I liked the least - the ending. Gylt is one of these games that features multiple endings. Whether you receive ending 1 or 2 depends only on what choice you make at the end, while ending 3 requires you to have located all 10 of the inhabitants and freed them. The issue here is that some of these inhabitants are quite well hidden. To find one in particular, you'll have to hit the button in an elevator to take you to a different floor, jump out before the doors close, and crouch beneath to fall into the elevator shaft! If I were to play the game upon release, when no guides had been written, there is no way that I would've located that inhabitant.
Ending 3 allows both girls to leave. This means that I would be stuck with ending 1 or 2, which just seem unbelievably harsh to me. With these endings, only one of the girls is able to make it home, Sally or Emily. And the game strongly suggests that it should be Sally that stays. When Emily was bullied (prior to the events of the game), Sally was dismissive and didn't take up for her. Granted this is unfortunate, but is developer Tequila Works suggesting that this emotionally immature 11 year-old girl should be stranded in what is essentially Silent Hill as a result? An old man that helps both Sally & Emily comments, "Sally, you know why you're here. Give Emily your ticket. Make things right." Make things right!? And as Emily leaves, Sally comments: "I wish I'd been a better cousin." This is...uh...past tense, signifying that Sally may indeed be in dark Bethelwood for the long haul.
So, I can recommend Gylt for the environments, puzzles, enemy designs and gameplay, but not for the fact that it implicitly suggests that an 11 year-old girl should be turned to stone and trapped in the shadow realm. I had a much higher overall opinion of the game prior to the ending, but still came out of it with a net positive impression.