The only sound that greets you upon booting up Eclipsium is a loudly throbbing heart. As one must when encountering horror media, the game and I immediately enter a spiritual staring contest, each of us knowing the real game here was it trying to freak me out. “It’s fine”, I decided. “It’s just a heart! I’ve got a heart. It’s actually very useful. Nothing to be scared of”. Thing is, Eclipsium’s menu heart is actually massive and sits, like The Eye Of Sauron, atop a giant obelisk. “Ah. That’s definitely a horror thing, that” I was forced to admit. “If my heart was on a giant obelisk, I’d be proper shaken up, I reckon.”
So starts Eclipsium’s very first bit of aggressive disorientation, and it basically just escalates from there. I obviously can’t describe the vibes without slightly spoiling the vibes, so do pop over to Steam for a demo if you’re curious and, oh, there’s a potted plant, the sound of its rustling mixed in such a way that it sort of sounds like it’s shrieking at me. Well.
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The first thing I really honed in on with Eclipsium is its use of the first person perspective, and specifically the hands. Your right hand is permanently held out, palm facing forward, as if to clamber through darkness or prepare to bop a potentially aggressive dog on the nose with the heel. Your fingers move slightly as you look about, and there’s an extra layer of unnerving presence in the hand posture being very similar to the one I use for my ergonomic mouse. One idle animation has you briefly flex it into the claw. It all contributes one of the most effective and unique horror game tricks I’ve seen in a hot minute. There’s an utter vulnerability to at once being reminded your character has a physical body, and is also completely lacking a shotgun.
You start the game in a cabin, and as you explore, your hand will automatically stretch out at interactable objects. A globe. The shrieking plant. A key. The cabin is lit warmly in warped orange hues, and utterly depressing classical music plays. I unlock the door, step out into the woods, and turn around to ascertain the dimensions of the cabin. It is now dark, the music has stopped, and all the furnishings are gone. You’re trying to horror me up, aren’t you, Eclipsium? You’re trying to rustle my shirt buttons, and it’s absolutely working.
The midnight woods are lit by a bright red blood sky, and I get lost quite quickly, finding a strange mushroom in the woods that makes my vision go even more fuzzy than it already was. As is customary, I stare at my hands for a bit until the effects fade. The woods eventually offer up their greatest bounty: an axe, which I use to chop down a tree to make a bridge across a ravine. This breaks the axe. As I cross the tree, I think back to all the good times I had with the axe. A truly wonderful four seconds, it was. Now I am axe-less, and the woods are very threatening.
I will not tell what lay in the cave I found at the end of that path, but I will say that Eclipsium’s atmosphere is so thick and frightening you could cut it with, well, a deceptively sturdy axe. Here are some solid oak Steam facts:
- Explore over a dozen vivid and surreal environments
- Multiple carefully crafted full-motion video cutscenes
- Intuitive and atmospheric puzzles
- Painstakingly created hand animations
They did not lie about the hand animations, I’ll tell you that.