I didn’t know it was possible for one game to ape from this many different eras of indie horror. Egghead Gumpty has it all: from the page key collecting gameplay of Slender: The Eight Pages, the jumpscares on-fail (which make you stop in your tracks half a second before they happen so they’ll never take you off guard) a la Five Nights at Freddy’s, and a procedurally generated setting that totally isn’t The Backrooms you guys, it’s clear that this game is a patchwork chimera of much more trendsetty horror games, and one that… is certainly not the sum of its parts. Even what here that’s original isn’t exactly functional: the titular Egghead Gumpty’s main mechanic is that he’ll appear somewhere in the room you’re in, and you’ll have to find him before a timer runs out, which works when it happens when you’re in a room, but when you’re in any of the corridors — which are all rather long and undefined in shape given the procedural generation — he can spawn far enough away from you that you have no clue where he is and can’t really get an inkling of his location before he kills you. There’s this baby thing that… I think you’re meant to play Red Light Green Light with, but the mechanics around it are so unclear and I died every time I dared to try figure it out. The procedural generation, I feel, does more harm and good here: even other than RNG bullshit where you lose resources/can’t find the places you need to go I feel like it’s hard to feel invested into figuring out your surroundings and figuring out the optimal way to collect everything when the floors change every time you die or even when the floors sometime delete themselves and trap you inside a dead end. I tried this for about 90 minutes, sometimes making some progress before getting fucked over by the puppet baby or Gumpty making me find him in one of the huge hallways. Maybe if I put in some effort I could complete it… but also I didn’t really feel much of a need to. I feel like faffing about and getting killed for 90 minutes really got me to the yolk of the experience here.