Having always been a Tim Burton fan, and having seen many of his movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and others more times than I can count, I’ll admit to being nervous about a game that looked like it was cribbing his general visual style. Thankfully, I was pleased pretty well right out of the gate that Gloomy Eyes does much more than merely borrow from his book of visual tricks, and instead mixes together a fantastic story, characters, and puzzles to make something wholly unique and somewhat memorable.

After a pretty brief introduction you’ll start by controlling Gloomy, the boy zombie, who is decidedly less flesh-hungry than his brethren and enchanted by fireflies. Pretty quickly you’ll then be paired with the mischievous Nena, a little girl who is bored by her life and who has tired of being under her uncle’s thumb. Once they’ve joined forces you’ll move them from scene to scene, switching between them to solve a variety of puzzles in each of the small diorama-like areas you’ll encounter. In many ways while there are clearly differences in their overall style, this actually reminded me a great deal of the excellent The Gardens Between, weaving the puzzles and story together in a creative way, and encouraging you to rotate the scene in order to work out how to proceed.

While many of its elements are charming, there are spots where it can feel rough around the edges. While there are often visual cues of some yellow paint to help you work out areas you should focus on, there were times where even moving back and forth between both characters it was hard to follow what needed to be done. In part this is a function of the intricacy of the different vignettes, and I would later discover that I had been trying to work on solutions to problems out of the intended order. In the same vein, while being able to rotate things around to see better generally works well enough, there were also instances where I couldn’t quite get the camera to behave and let me focus precisely where I wanted to, making some puzzles take a little longer due to some clumsiness. Regardless, the story and imagery managed to suck me in almost instantly, and I was generally enchanted throughout by its thoughtful design.