The Homage To End All Homages
HIGH A pretty solid soundtrack.
LOW A comparatively weaker second half.
WTF A girl with a humongous rifle!
I hope it doesn’t sound like too much of a diss when I say that The Glass Staircase feels more like a mood board than a videogame. It’s a short collection of combined elements from different genres and mediums that the creator is clearly passionate about — their Itch page states that it’s “an homage to PS2 survival horror and Italian zombie movies” — and designed to appeal to a subset of nostalgic indie fans.
Now, I’m usually not big on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake (I think it’s a crippling emotion, to be honest) but I have to admit that The Glass Staircase recreates the low-poly survival horror aesthetic accurately. Characters look satisfyingly crunchy and pixelly when far away, the minimalist music filled with midi thrumming recalls Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill soundtracks, the third-person perspective utilizes old-school Resident Evil-style tank controls, and so on.
In fact, it recreates the aesthetic so faithfully that the first half of The Glass Staircase — which features no combat, allowing the player to wander an empty mansion and its immediate vicinity as the score thrums on — creates a kind of Uncanny Valley effect via withholding just enough of the genre’s hallmarks to make the player feel like there’s something off about the experience. There’s not even a save room or manual saves in general, just a few autosaves.
The Glass Staircase’s story, mainly delivered through letters found by the player, is both familiar and vague in the same slightly askew manner. The affair takes place in the early 20th century, and is centered around some girls trapped in a decrepit mansion and given various ‘tasks’ through a mysterious intercom system. As it turns out, the mansion belonged to a mysterious man conducting sinister experiments after his return from the Great War, where we worked as a combat medic.
The story hits many of the beats the player will probably be expecting, but the storytelling style (along with the dialogue, which is almost entirely delivered in short, cryptic bursts) feels strange and mysterious due to its brand of offbeat indie minimalism. The first half of Glass Staircase feels lonely, longing and degraded in an interesting way — in the same manner that, say, vaporwave does.
That may seem like a bizarre comparison, but I genuinely felt that loneliness and longing, not menace, in The Glass Staircase‘s first half. For about an hour, I was quite enthralled by the willingness to force the player to inhabit a survival horror world exhausted of all its customary elements like a nostalgic gamer returning, time after time, to a set of aesthetic ideas that no longer hold the same fascination.
Unfortunately, the second half of The Glass Staircase plays things far straighter. The player gets a gun basically out of nowhere and the shift into emulation of classic survival horror’s combat and puzzling was far less interesting as its cracks began to show.
The handful of bossfights were particularly aggravating to me. The fixed camera angles didn’t add suspense — they simply impeded accurate movement and changed angles so frantically that it became irritating. Also, due to the dodo-brained boss AI giving chase, the player typically runs in a circle for most of the encounter while accidentally slamming into objects they can’t properly see.
In one odd circumstance, a boss (the first one) didn’t seem to function at all! The few times I fought them, I shot them once and they immediately ran out of my camera’s view. Either they’d suddenly begin running at me again when I approached, or they’d sit still on the other side of the room while I calmly pelted shots at them.
Of course, this is a small Itch title, seemingly developed by one person — I hardly think it’d be fair to judge it too harshly for its rougher edges. Nostalgia-driven retro horror players don’t come to these sorts of projects for triple-A polish, anyhow. No, they’re looking for ideas and styles that bring the back to a moment that was popular a few generations ago. Yes, the style of The Glass Staircase is predicated on nostalgia, like so much of our current cultural output, but there’s clearly a craving for this sort of old-school design and aesthetic, and it’s a craving that The Glass Staircase will undoubtedly satisfy for an hour or two.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Puppet Combo. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, XBO/S/X and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 2 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: according to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Violence. There’s a decent amount of fairly explicit gore in the game, as well as some brief moments of nudity.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. I don’t recall encountering any puzzles or enemy encounters that relied on audio. In addition, the little dialogue that the game has is all communicated via subtitles. I believe this game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.
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