The Secret of Gillwood

Review

The town of Gillwood has gone silent for Gods. The prayers of the devout followers can no longer be heard; without the prayers of the faithful, the Gods’ power soon start to dwindle away. They send their most trusted guardian to Earth to see why the people have gone silent. You will take control of the guardian and seek out the answers the Gods have requested of you. The atmosphere is dark and foggy. There are no signs of people anywhere to be seen. Your character is portrayed by sprites in the shape of a cross. You must explore the environment looking for the energy orbs that will unlock the next areas. Once you find an orb you must study the surrounding area for the path that leads to it for collection, then you will need your parkour skills to reach them as you work across rooftops, poles, floating and moving platforms and other objects in the game world. Can you uncover the mystery of why Gillwood has fallen silent?

Released and self-published on March 28, 2019, by the developer Snow Moose Entertainment, this is a single-player, parkour, puzzler and the first release on steam by the developer. It is a one-person project; all the programming is done by one man and has been in production for 4 years. It originally made greenlight back in 2017 before Valve axed the service. It doesn't say it features full controller support, but it does have some controller support; I was able to use to my Xbox 360 controller. I was more comfortable using a keyboard and mouse for my play time. My son preferred the controller when I let him try it. You can view the keybindings for the controller and keyboard and mouse in the settings. They are not re-bindable though, so you will have to use the preconfigured settings. In video settings, there are some quality of life settings to customize for the best visual quality. These include brightness, view distance, resolution up to 2560x1440 in borderless window mode (auto-detection in fullscreen mode), anti-aliasing, post-processing, shadow quality, effects quality, and window or fullscreen mode. It also has a professionally made score for the title composed by Gunthrie Lowe, which is quite beautiful.

I did find the game to be a bit dark for my taste outside of horror titles. I had to turn up the gamma to be able to see well enough to play. I do have vision issues as I am an aging gamer, so your experience may differ. The parkour is not overly challenging but can require very precise jumps in some areas to land it. Practice makes perfect . . . having trouble? Look closer at the environment and try a different angle. The camera follow still needs work; often your view will be blocked by parts of the environment or it zooms so far in you cannot see anything. I often had to go to a top-down view just to see what was around me.

Being the love child of a single developer, the game does have an interesting concept, and it does have a fair priceline for a short indie title, which should take you less than 3 hours to complete. The one thing that did really help was the quick save and load feature; forget to use it and fail in your jumps - its start that area all over again! Using it in-between difficult jumps helps a lot in progression, or you can play without saving if you want a more hard-core mode! Some jumps will require the use of the sprint button; timing is important as the sprint length is short and you go back to a walk quite fast. The sneak feature allows for better control in lining up a jump or making a short jump. I was able to 100% the 6 achievements as I ended my gameplay.

Review written by DamageInc.for Zeepond.com!