Copyright Polygon
Not all Halloween horror needs to terrify. From Scooby-Doo to Over the Garden Wall, plenty of spooky-season staples are enjoyable without raising your heart rate. There’s also a growing library of spooky-cute games with Halloween vibes, but not the sleep-with-the-lights-on level of horror. Gloomy Eyes came out in September, and is an excellent cozy alternative to the truly terrifying games of 2025. Described as a “self-coop” puzzle game, Gloomy Eyes pairs up a zombie boy, Gloomy, and a human girl, Nena, as they adventure to bring the sun back to their dark, dark world. They look like Funko Pops crossed with the puppets from a Laika film. Their pale-skinned and baggy-eyed aesthetic borrows heavily from the look of Tim Burton’s films, and the story is a quintessential family-friendly adventure. The pair develops an unbreakable friendship over the course of the game’s 14 chapters as Nena tries to show her priest uncle that, hey, maybe zombies aren’t half bad. The “self-coop” description comes about from the game’s environmental puzzles. Once Gloomy and Nena cross paths, you’ll swap between the newfound friends to solve puzzles and advance through the levels. Being a zombie, Gloomy can’t walk through the light of a lamppost, while Nena will get snatched up by idle zombies unless a light is shone on them. They have to work in tandem — well, you’ll use them in tandem — to finish levels. Nena may move or temporarily shut off lights to clear paths for Gloomy, while the open-brained boy will use his zombie strength to shift around objects in the environment, opening up paths for Nena. The puzzles remind me a bit of The Gardens Between, in the way the levels are floating, diorama-like structures that the camera pans around in conjunction with your characters. Gloomy Eyes’ environments are quite fun, taking the friends around a carnival and through a haunted house, among other locales. There’s a “diorama view” button that allows you to zoom out and rotate the levels, both to admire the designs and hunt for paths that may not have been obvious. And that’s one of the only hiccups with Gloomy Eyes. Like other games with a fixed perspective, it’s not always clear where the characters can and cannot go. You may need to just bump into a few random objects to figure out which ones are interactable, as it’s not always intuitive. However, those minor speedbumps don’t get in the way of a spooky-cute good time. Gloomy Eyes runs on the short side, with about three to five hours worth of puzzles. Later levels blend together minor stealth and action elements with the puzzle solving, as Gloomy Eyes marches toward a satisfying — and somewhat surprising — conclusion. Those shying away from the frights of a Silent Hill f won’t want to miss Gloomy Eyes. It’s available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, and is currently on sale for 25% off on Steam and the Xbox store.
