Housefire’s first-person horror game, Eclipsium, is more of an experience than a game. It’s three to four hours of stunning visuals, breathtaking music and ambience, and gut-wrenching symbolism. This is one of the few games that can be completed in one sitting, but also offers the best experience by doing so. Put on some headphones, turn off the lights, and be immersed into a surreal, devastatingly beautiful experience for a few hours.
We start off on a hospital bed. To leave the room we must weigh a sacrifice on the scales. So, we cut out our own tongue and present it as an offering. Outside the hospital is an apocalyptic world, bathed in the blood red hue of the sky. At the center of the storm is a tower hosting a large, beating heart which blots out the sun. As we progress through this crumbling world, we chase a strange witch-like figure who is both an inviting light and an unnerving, towering force. We chase her light, crawling through hell to do so and sacrificing pieces of ourselves in the process.
Eclipsium’s story is told through visuals and audio cues alone. There’s no dialogue, no text, and the few cutscenes give very little context to what’s going on. For the most part, the story seems up to player interpretation. While I’m not usually a fan of this style of storytelling, I was able to come up with my own narrative and enjoyed reading others’ understandings of the story. To me, the player character is dying from a disease that slowly eats away at them, and they follow the light to embrace death and end their suffering, which they once feared.
Resembling a walking sim, the gameplay consists of a few environmental puzzles which we solve by experimenting with the environment, progressively picking up different tools to help us along the way. There’s also some platforming elements, though this mostly consists of falling onto platforms as the world crumbles around us. While the puzzles were minimal, putting more focus on Eclipsium’s ambience and emotional experience, what was available served well in between the big visual moments and I did end up taking some time on a few of them.
Without much gameplay and barely a story to boot, Eclipsium does a masterful job of thriving on atmosphere alone. The art style is heavily pixelated, though you can see the remnants of a stunning world behind it. To begin with, I did find the pixelation difficult to play with. But while there is an option to turn this down a couple of notches at the cost of not playing the game how the developer intended, my eyes soon adjusted to it and I did not need to do this. In fact, the graphics made the game feel more claustrophobic to play; because not everything is clear, I found myself reacting more to environmental cue, such as parts of the floors or walls breaking away or rustling sounds coming from trees.
Much of Eclipsium‘s strength, therefore, lies entirely on its sound design and soundtrack, which absolutely rocks. In fact, I ran to Spotify once the credits rolled and was delighted to find that the whole soundtrack is available on there. The soundtrack trickled in when it needed to, starting off with some mild ambient scores while I got used to the environment and gameplay situation, and by the end it was roaring with emotion. Each time the soundtrack took off was a highlight of the game, bringing power and emotion to stunning visual moments that had barely any context behind them. Eclipsium does a miracle job with building passion and drive through just atmosphere alone – I had no idea who I was or where I was going, but each time the music lifted I was pushed forward regardless.
While it would have been nicer to have had just a little more context behind the visual symbolism or meaning behind our actions, Eclipsium was still an amazing experience. I will say that our character does maybe walk a little too painfully slow, especially towards the end where there was a section where I was walking back and forth a lot. But besides that, I definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a unique horror experience which can be completed (and I insist that you do so) in a single sitting.
Jess reviewed Eclipsium on PC with a provided review copy.
