I cut out my tongue to unlock a door in Eclipsium, then things started getting weird

(Image credit: Critical Reflex)

Eclipsium is a game about removing your own heart—to no obvious personal detriment—in order to power a great and unfathomable machine. Eclipsium is a game about cutting an enormous hole in your hand that you can peer through to see secret pathways. Eclipsium is a game about transitioning from great heights to profound depths with little logic in between. I don't actually know what Eclipsium is about. I like it a lot.

Eclipsium is a first-person horror game with light puzzle elements brought to you by the same publisher behind No, I'm Not a Human, and the vibes are… somewhat comparable. Eclipsium is psychedelic where NINAH is eerie, but the sense that the world you inhabit is fundamentally wrong in some indefinable way is very much there.

You wake up in hospital. Who you are is not explained, and nor is what you look like. All you are is a hand—sometimes a pair of hands—extended constantly forwards to grip, grope, and move the world.

You find some scissors, you take the scissors to a door that seems to have been overcome by the strange tendrils from Deadly Premonition, and click. Your character then cuts out their own tongue and uses it to convince the door to open, somehow.

Also, all of this done in a mix of PS1-era graphics (now a staple for indie horror; presumably because Sony's OG console and its swimmy vertices are so good at feeling wrong), FMV footage of hands and limbs, and heavy pixelation.

Colours are bright, but shapes are indefinable until you get close, and structures don't so much appear on the horizon as emerge out of it, gathering form from a blurry mass of bright pixels.

Approaching a menacing, glowing orb. — (Image credit: Critical Reflex)

It's pure vibes, I suppose, and despite some light puzzling in what I've played so far—moving around lights to clear paths of photophobic worms—its style is more walking sim than Resident Evil, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. If nothing else, I want to keep plodding through its hallways to see what it springs on me next.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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