REVIEW: Incomprehensibly beautiful and oppressively tense, Eclipsium is a stunning technical achievement in horror gaming

There are moments in life that seem to drag on forever. Moments that leave you alone with your thoughts, spiraling as you reflect on every decision that brought you here and every decision you might have to make after. Moments that you'd do anything to be rid of, to move past.

Eclipsium is the experience of the waiting — that fretting and fearing. It's a cosmic horror that overwhelms the senses, and in its three-hour runtime, it grabs hold of you and never lets go. It's yet another indie horror masterpiece in an era made of indie horror masterpieces, and you owe it to yourself to experience it.

​Just the Facts

Developer: Housefire

Publisher: CRITICAL REFLEX

​Platform(s): PC

​Price: $12.99

Release Date: September 19, 2025

Review key provided by publisher via Sandbox Strategies.

Eclipsium comes to us from Housefire, a Swedish game development team that came together, game jammed out a project that birthed the incredible art style we see in Eclipsium, and never looked back. Teaming up with CRITICAL REFLEX, publisher of games like Mouthwashing and Buckshot Roulette, puts this project up with some modern classics — and it earns its place amongst them.

In Eclipsium, you play as The Wanderer on a journey to find Her. That's all you're getting from Housefire before you start, and I won't offer much more either, after playing through the game myself. Who She is, who The Wanderer is, why it's all so vaguely described... it doesn't really matter. What matters is understanding that they're being kept apart and The Wanderer is willing to put everything on the line to change that.

They drift into a dream-like space known as Eclipsium, a realm made up of surreal vistas and hauntingly oppressive environments. The Wanderer pushes forward, putting their body on the line as they confront the horrors of this reality — and as they do, they begin to remember bits and pieces of why they're here and what they're after. Flashbacks fill in the gaps, but you won't be judged for not truly understanding what's happening in front of you. Housefire seems happy to play in the obscure and to focus more on evoking specific emotions than on answering discrete questions or on providing coherence.

And that's a good thing.

It's a short game, one that I recommend you play in one sitting, with the lights off and headphones on. But you rarely feel its length. It pulls you in from the jump, and despite the short runtime, it feels like it lasts forever.

Eclipsium is incredibly overwhelming as it confronts each of your senses. It's a masterwork in sound design, especially as used for heightening your sense of fear. Your ears will encounter the sounds of shots in the distance when you enter a forest; clanging metallic industry in a factory whose purpose you can't really pinpoint; and, when you wake up in a unfamiliar hospital bed, whispering nightmares assault you from beginning to end. The layered soundscape isn't grating, but it's almost always uncomfortable in a way that makes the game's horror work — even when it grows quiet. Especially then, because you wonder and worry where the noise has all gone when it does.

Right when you get used to the silence, Eclipsium is likely to toss in one of its unexpectedly high-energy music tracks in a chapter's climax. Music is used sparingly, but every time they play that card, it's powerful. Hudson Bikichky's work here, both in general sound design and with the soundtrack, is a definite highlight and a showcase of how important sound is to horror.

It all adds up to a unique approach to horror from Housefire, one that never leans too hard on any obvious tropes and concepts: there are no jumpscares, no combat, no traditional "monsters" to face off with. But the world of Eclipsium constantly puts you in tense situations, capturing my favorite form of horror by making your fear more driven by adrenaline and the things you can't quite explain or understand waiting off in the distance.

What makes Eclipsium's "what isn't seen but heard" horror even more effective is the fact that everything you do see is obscured by a layer of dithered pixel work. Chunky pixels, limited color palettes, and wobbly textures give you a taste of the evocative lo-fi retro indie horror stylings of the last decade, but painted with a brand new brush. It's unlike anything I've played or experienced, particularly when the game cranks its trippiness up to 11 in its final moments. It's the kind of game that has to be seen to be understood. Even trailers and videos don't do it justice — you need to see it running on your machine in front of you to truly grasp what Housefire's artists have pulled off.

Eclipsium's visual design almost brings to mind the curious horror of early PC gaming worlds that weren't necessarily designed to scare. The strange spaces designed for games like Myst, and some of those early '90s shooters that pulled you into their empty corners and provoked your curiosity. It does this both in the plain and mundane — hospital waiting rooms and simple villages — and in the spooky and surreal, like endless floating islands that repeat as you soar past them. It's working with a corner of the low-poly trendy art style that hasn't really been explored, at least not in the ways that Housefire does here.

A cosmic horror that overwhelms the senses ... you owe it to yourself to experience it.

This is especially amplified with the game's FMV concepts, made even more intriguing when layered behind their trademark pixel-focused style. The Wanderer's arms are filmed and scanned in. The organs he rips from his own flesh are clay objects designed by Housefire's artists. And entire cutscenes seem to be stitched with these mixed media design choices that is brilliant to see blended and wild to see in motion.

It's the kind of art style choice that some will see as a gimmick, but that does everything to earn its place in elevating the game's intentions in meaningful ways. It's what called me to this project in the first place and for that, I'm thankful.

Eclipsium's gameplay experience is described best as an atmospheric horror walking sim with light puzzling and platforming. It's exploration focused, asking you to poke at those obscured corners of its reality, and fairly straightforward in design. It's the kind of game where walking toward whatever's new will inevitably lead you to success.

As you explore the world known as Eclipsium, you'll stumble into strange relics that impart flesh-ripping abilities into The Wanderer: a knife that gets grafted into your hand, a hole in your palm that you can use to find hidden paths and objects, an eternal flame that consumes your hand and lights the way forward. These three abilities make up most of the game's puzzle solving, which on the whole is lighter than you'd think and simpler than the horror genre usually offers, but still enjoyable. The game's final moments tested the brain more than I expected, but primarily, you can expect to simply wander.

There are light moments of platforming that can be a little frustrating, for no other reason than the fact that the game is clearly not built for that, and walking around can be agonizingly slow at times (despite the fact that I played the game after a patch apparently increased movement speed), but these issues are far from game breaking. Eclipsium is the kind of game that's more experienced than played, but it's still a testament to the power of interactivity in gaming in spite of that.

Whether you're precariously poking at cliffside walkways, experiencing the claustrophobia of an industrial slaughterhouse, or locking eyes with an impossibly large being, Eclipsium immerses you from end to end. Even if you aren't managing inventories or having to understand some complex battle system.

Eclipsium is a full-body gaming experience: a horror that overwhelms the senses, thrives in the incomprehensible and unexplained, and is built around innately tense situations. It's beautiful. It's nerve-wracking. It's the kind of work I can't wait to see more of.

Video Games Are Good and Eclipsium is . . . GREAT. (9/10)

+ a horror experience that engages all the senses, stunning art design that brings to mind early PC gaming, short and punchy

- more a game experienced than played, puzzles are simple, prolonged raised heart rate due to game's tension may be bad for some

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