If there's a popular genre for Indies that I very rarely cover on here, especially in June, it's games that focus on horror and delivering scares and spooks to what is almost assuredly an audience of YouTubers looking to delight their audiences with their genuinely terrified reactions. As such, I don't tend to put a lot of stock in the genre outside of a few that catch my eye either because they managed to critically rise above the legion of low-effort startle-a-thons or they clearly have a bit more in the way of ambition or a sizeable budget to work with. Gylt is one such case, which I'd cheerfully summarize as Silent Hill for babies. Wait, I think I can be a little kinder than that. Gylt is a psychological survival horror game aimed at the Goosebumps crowd; one that replicates the beats of a Silent Hill or similar "is it all in their mind?" personalized nightmare simulator but with simpler controls and mechanics, easier challenges to overcome, themes that are less "man is sexually frustrated by his invalid wife" and more "bullying sucks yo", and a less intense (but still sufficiently eerie) atmosphere and setting. Naturally, being a horror game involving middle-schoolers, a little bit of Stranger Things snuck itself in there too.

The two main things that intrigued me about Gylt, to the point where I was willing to play it for IGotW instead of yet another explormer or Zeldersatz or whatever other neologism I invented this week that will never catch on, involve both its developer and its debut platform. The former is Tequila Works, a Spanish team that caught my attention with 2017's time-looping assassination adventure game The Sexy Brutale—another game I thought merged the supernatural macabre with some compelling mechanical flourishes—while the latter relates to how the game was, until very recently, a Google Stadia exclusive. That has no bearing on the quality of the game, of course, only that through circumstance it was presented as some sort of killer app—a rare gaming experience you couldn't get anywhere else—which may have been a little unfair to its relatively modest charms. I'm inclined to be a little more forgiving than contemporary reviews as a result, perhaps.

The story of Gylt has preteen protagonist Sally searching for her grade schooler cousin, Emily, who vanished just over a month ago. Despite ticketing the town in missing person posters she's no closer to discovering what happened until a chance encounter with some school bullies drops her into a spooky parallel version of her town of Bethelwood, filled with debris and monsters and no other human beings save for Emily, who has been surviving in this place for the whole time she's been missing. Sally then embarks on a rescue mission all the while evading the shadowy creatures that occupy the town. As with most horror games, the modus operandi here is "detours, and lots of them" as you're required to pick circuitous routes around obstacles that will frequently put you in harm's way or place some manner of environmental puzzle in your path, usually both. Early on, your best bet against the enemies is to sneak by or run and hide: eventually, you acquire the means to eliminate the roaming monsters, though there's an achievement incentive to keep things pacifistic (which, honestly, didn't add that much more challenge). There are also boss fights which you can't pacifist your way through, though most of these take the form of puzzles of their own: a camera spotlight demon, for example, from which you can only conceal yourself. The game has a very slight open-world explormer aspect (I swear I didn't know about it beforehand) where you can retrace your steps with a new item—you acquire a flashlight with a damaging flash attachment and a fire extinguisher that can mitigate a surprising number of situations—to acquire some missing collectible or other.

Despite being a fully 3D game, much of how Gylt carries itself reminded me of the side-scrolling children-in-peril horror games out there like Limbo, Inside, or the Little Nightmare series. Much of the puzzles involve pushing and pulling objects around to climb on or hitting switches to turn off electrical hazards, and the generous map always makes it clear where you can and cannot access while marking items like curatives or battery replacements for the flashlight (which can be used endlessly as a light source, though the flash function saps power) in case you need them later. Moving past enemies mostly just involves staying out of their line of sight and crawling to reduce noise—they can both see and hear moderately well—and there's a grace period before the little UI indicator that shows that they've noticed your presence goes from an oblivious white to a curious yellow to an aggressive red. There's only a few enemy types—my favorite was the invisible guy you cannot stealth away from, but moves slowly enough to hardly be an issue—and they'll keep spawning into areas as you continue to solve puzzles and make more progress. The gameplay overall is satisfactory if nothing too challenging or interesting; Gylt frequently comes off like an introductory level game for its genre, though perhaps it's more that the presentation takes a more pivotal role and the gameplay exists to keep things trucking along. In audio/visual terms the game is impressive enough: the world of this small town is large and filled with details, the monster designs are great (if limited), it does excellent work with genre norms like spooky mood lighting and giving you some earned frights with some cinematic first encounters with the larger boss creatures, and the orchestral score is solid enough work that adroitly sets the mood.

I suppose if I should credit Gylt for something in particular, it would be for how it makes for an effective way to introduce a younger audience to the nuances and mechanics of this genre if they weren't already very familiar through the aforementioned YouTubers: one that pulls the punches of what can often be a very intense experience to push through for the squeamish and squeakish alike. Sally and Emily's struggles to fit in at school might resonate with that crowd as well, with the latter pushed to the point of depression due to her treatment by bullies and the former's ignorance of it all despite being the older cousin that Emily looks to for support. That psychological trauma is, of course, manifested into horrifying reality by this unsettling place, more details behind which can only be found by pursuing an optional collectible scavenger hunt for diaries left behind by other prisoners of the town. The eeriest manifestations are the mannequins that look like Sally who all purport to be friendly while hunting for you but prove to be anything but when they finally spot you: they're not so much figments taken from Sally's own imagination as they are visions of how Emily sees her turncoat neglectful cousin. I liked Gylt but at the same time it's probably because my tolerance for this genre isn't particularly high, especially when stealth is so prevalent a mechanic, that I probably just appreciated the easier ride through those familiar trappings. Like playing a game you're only half invested in with cheat codes to make it more engaging. Even if you let yourself get spotted because you were being careless, it doesn't take much to run and hide in a vent or through an area transition before you're overwhelmed and those healing items really are everywhere. Outside of being in a particular age range or mood, Gylt doesn't have a whole lot going on beyond its impressive presentation to draw you in, but I'd still recommend it if you're looking for a softer horror experience; especially one that clearly has a lot of heart and consideration put into its craft, rather than some ghoulie from the Unity asset store filling your screen every few moments with a loud noise because you had the audacity to stop and read a note filled with typos.

: 3 out of 5.