Gloomy Eyes – PS5 Review

Gloomy Eyes was originally a VR movie released in 2020 featuring that fella Colin Farrell as the narrator aka the gravekeeper. This is the game of the movie if you will, using many of the assets from the pre-rendered movie for the game. It shares the same scenario broadly as well. The narrator isn’t Farrell anymore, but instead some other Irish fella. This comes from Mons based developer Fishing Cactus, published by Untold Tales.

Penned as a singleplayer co-op game, it eschews some of the VR gimmickry seen in the film and that’s no bad thing. After all, even Sony have gone lukewarm on the whole VR experiment quicker than they abandoned the amazing Vita.

Practically you switch between Gloomy the zombie boy and Nina the lonely little girl. She lives with her uncle and Gloomy lives amongst the rubbish discarded by the humans. The aesthetic is very much along the lines of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, all dank dark landscapes and steampunkish machinery.

Nina’s uncle has it in for the zombies that otherwise coexist alongside the humans of the piece and it’s down to you both to see him and his followers off. Gloomy is vulnerable to light and Nina is vulnerable to zombies who’d quite like to snack on her.

What transpires is an adventure across Gloomy Eyes fourteen chapters as the pair of them seek to defy Nina’s uncle and his cult followers to continue their friendship.

The switching roles aspect reminded this old gamer of Interplay’s long defunct Lost Vikings series, and to a lesser extent Starbreeze’s PS3 and 360 era Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It works quite well for the most part, though we did find ourselves hopelessly stuck on occasion. Although sometimes we prevailed in spite of the obstacles in our way, most notably in the stage where you climb a lighthouse. We’re not sure whether emergent gameplay was in Fishing Cactus’s remit, but it was fun to get through regardless.

We don’t recommend you play Gloomy Eyes with a walkthrough, but we’d certainly recommend you have the trophy list to hand as many of the trophies are specific to certain locations and very easily missed. The story is the main focus here, but if you play as we often do with a sideways glance at the trophies, it’s nice to get them as you progress.

Rather than a VR landscape, each of the levels is presented as a diorama of sorts where you can rotate the camera. This is at once welcome and also, at times, confounding. On a few occasions it is simply impossible to know what your next move is. Much less find the gravekeeper or memories within each level. Thankfully the main menu shows you your progress in specific levels, denoting whether you’ve bagged both collectibles where applicable and you can do so with no impediment to progress otherwise.

Each level is a self-contained vignette of sorts with its own sub-objectives, one thing that remains constant is the need to switch between Nina and Gloomy to progress. Sometimes it is obvious what to do, other times it isn’t. The problem is partly down to the pre-rendered nature of the landscapes, some paths simply aren’t clear and when you’re struggling to find your way, it does feel like you’re on a hiding to nothing. Additionally, the fixed camera aspect can be a factor, especially when you’re trying to figure out your next move or find an object needed to move the story along.

If you resort to a guide you’ll tear through Gloomy Eyes storyline in no time, so unless you find yourself completely stuck as to how to progress, we’d recommend you play through as best you can. By all means, if you reach the end of the game and some collectibles have evaded you as they have us, make like Wham and go for it.

It might seem like we’ve spent a lot of time complaining about Gloomy Eyes’ shortcomings, but if nothing else, it is beautiful. Those render farms that did the movie did a good job and it shows here in terms of the sense of place. Creeping around an abandoned fairground for example, genuinely feels like you’re a kid sneaking around somewhere you really ought not to be.

In conclusion, Gloomy Eyes is a solid enough adventure with a few snags on it. The pre-rendered nature of it makes for tough sledding at times, but the earnest delivery of the gravekeeper by the Irish narrator is very welcome. It outdoes Farrell’s original delivery anyway. Though talking of Farrell, a game version of The Banshees of Inisherin would be something we’d play, if only to see how weird it’d be. The sense of place is great here but we did find ourselves stuck far more often than we’d care to admit.