It might be linear and obvious to me, a hardened player with a thousand yard stare from all the hours playing Fromsoft games and reviewing Resi 7, but this is a technically non-violent game where you zap shadow monsters with a torch in order to save your cousin from nightmare versions of school bullies! And it's pretty great at that, you know? Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Tequila Works This is a game that feels squarely directed at children - not six-year-olds, of course, but kids in that sort of grey, pre-teen area. But I also don't think it's really aimed at survival horror veterans, or even adults at all. This could mean that for experienced survival horror veterans, or even games in general, Gylt could be disappointingly easy.

There are also optional collectibles to find that include baby's first text logs, but none of them are very far off the beaten track at all. You can sneak behind some enemies to do instant stealth takedowns, engage in boss fights that are largely just timed stealth segments, and you get a recharging stun attack and a fire extinguisher to open up traversal options around environmental hazards. The reason why this is Alan-Wake-for-kids, though, is because these monsters have the smarts of a bag of spanners, to put it bluntly, and batteries for your torch (which only drain when you focus it for attacks) and inhalers to refill your health are stashed by an extremely generous hand around the school and adjacent buildings you explore. They are not unlike the ones you find in Alan Wake. The monsters come in a few variants that include 'invisible', 'cow', and 'terrifying mannequins' of oneself. Sally has few defences save creeping around and shining a powerful torch at the monsters, who don't like strong li- hey, now my title makes sense! One autumnal evening, Sally gets lost and tries to take the old mining cable car back home - only to discover herself in a weird mirror version of her home town, derelict and abandoned save for shadowy monsters, the likes of which you'd find as models in Forbidden Planet in a cabinet labelled 'From The Mind Of Tim Burton'. You play as Sally, a young girl whose even younger cousin Emily has gone missing. Until recently, Gylt (look, stay with it) was confined to Google's cloud gaming platform Stadia, but Stadia doesn't exist any more, so this third-person stealth adventure is being unleashed on Steam.

Gylt the game