58 / wfmag.ccReviewRated
GENRE
Stealth-horror
FORMAT
Stadia (tested)
DEVELOPER
Tequila Works
PUBLISHER
Tequila Works
PRICE
£29.99 (free w/
Pro subscription)
RELEASE
Out nowInfo
ReviewLeaves you feeling distinctly not-GYLTy
ou need to come out strong,
otherwise, you run the risk of
being quickly overlooked, and
soon after forgotten about.
Google’s Stadia needs a killer app;
that one exclusive game to really sell people on
the idea of a streaming future where we don’t
need dedicated hardware, and anyone who can
afford the subscription fee and good internet is
on a level footing. GYLT is not that game. GYLT is a
game from 2011 in shinier clothes, bereft of any
real excitement, repetitive
to the point of banality, and
not the sort of thing you’d be
able to sell an £8.99 a month
subscription off the back of.
That’s what it isn’t – but
what is GYLT? It’s a third-person horror-narrative-
puzzler, basically. You take on the role of Sally,
a young girl who refuses to give up looking for
her disappeared cousin. Chased by the bullies
who have been hounding her through her few
years on the planet, Sally ends up stumbling
into a living nightmare – the town she knows
so well, but twisted, weird, and wrong. Her hunt
for the missing cousin continues nevertheless,
but instead of bullies on her tail, it’s a bunch
of monsters and other supernatural sorts that
come out to play. Basically, imagine a world
where someone played Silent Hill then watched
Stranger Things, and you’ve got the idea.
What you actually do in GYLT isn’t all that
exciting, really. Exploration around the nightmareincarnation of the town, a lot of stealth as you
sneak about avoiding the gaze (and hearing
range) of the plentiful monsters, and some very
basic puzzle solving. It’s not ridiculously easy to
blunder through things in the most part – you can
and will fail at times – but there’s really not much
in the way of challenge. A powerlessness against
the monsters soon fades away as new items and
abilities come to the fore, so any real frights are
reserved for the odd cheap jump scare. Why
would a monster be in any way horrifying when it
struggles so much to see or
hear you coming, and you can
one-hit stealth kill it?
And that’s what GYLT all
comes down to, really: it’s
just not weighty enough an
experience. It can be spooky, sometimes scary,
but that atmosphere is inconsistent. Monsters
are initially worrying, soon enough hardly
relevant. The story sounds like it’s going to be
a big driver of things, but ends up almost an
afterthought. Tequila Works’ Stadia debut – the
first exclusive on the fledgling platform – isn’t
what Google needed to kickstart its would-be
revolution. But away from that aspect, it’s also not
what the third-person horror-narrative-puzzler
genre needed, either. You can turn off the brain
and gather some enjoyment here for the few
hours it lasts, and there are just about enough
scares to keep the adrenaline higher than resting
levels. But there’s zero revelatory about GYLT, and
little reason for this to be a platform exclusive.GYLT
Y
VERDICT
Sometimes good, largely
middling, GYLT isn’t a great
advert for Stadia.60 %
This... is genuinely
unsettling. Fair play.REVIEWED BY
Ian DransfieldReviewRated
“It can be spooky,
but that atmosphere
is inconsistent”HIGHLIGHT
It does falter, and you are sometimes
taken out of the experience, but
generally speaking GYLT is home to
a solid sense of place. It’s no small
compliment to say the game, at times,
conjures up a similar feeling to that of
Silent Hill: a weird town full of weird
things, and a bit scary too. Good stuff. Bullying plays a big part in
GYLT’s story, though narratively
it all feels a bit underbaked.