This is going to be a harsh review.

I want to start it off by saying I loved the visuals of this game. It's been one of the best looking horror games I've played to date. The art direction is purposeful and beautiful, and there's many visual effects in the game that really stuck by me.

Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. First of all, the gameplay: this entire game is a walking simulator. It attempts to add gameplay through puzzles, but there are none. The puzzles are mostly just: "Go forward, interact with thing, something opens, go forward again". There is only two actual puzzles in the game, and neither are difficult. The first one is fine enough, because you do actually have to figure something out, and the second one I thought was really inspired though it was easy.

Unfortunately, we then get to the next issue: the polish. (As in, how polished the game is, not the people). This game is, despite its beautiful visual, really unpolished. Time and time again I encountered visual bugs, 'level transitions' where the area you just came from got replaced by a black wall and a really unfortunate softlock for the last puzzle, which to me indicated a lack of actual playtesting. My softlock wasn't hard. I moved something from one area back to a hall where I came from, which it allowed me to do. Yet when I got the second something, the passage back to where I came from was suddenly gone, and I was softlocked. Numerous times too I came across triggers which didn't disable themselves after passing through, allowing you to clearly see and repeatedly trigger behaviour, which is just another indication of a lack of polish.

And finally, the story. I want to love the story. And I have some theory on what the game wants to communicate. But my god, is the communication of the story nonsensical. The themes are poorly conveyed, lots of areas, happenings and everything in between don't really make sense in the context of what (I think) it tries to communicate. It's just a mess. And I love a messy story, one that doesn't tell you outright what it wants to communicate, and rather lets you interpret and dance around it yourself. But even those stories need some good communication, some things which it does tell you outright. Those stories are incredibly hard to craft, and I don't think Eclipsium succeeded.

Did I regret buying this game? No, it was fun, I enjoyed the experience, and I'm glad I tried it. I'm excited to see what the developers think of next, since the amount of potential from this game is astounding. But do I recommend others buy it? Honestly, no. Just watch a video. The gameplay is so nothing, you will miss nothing by not playing it.

A lot of missed potential. I wish I loved this game more. I hope the developer's next game will blow me out of the water, because the potential is there.

5/10