Eclipsium is cosmic horror at its most fidgety and free-wheeling
Table Of Content
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun
Category: Games
Originally Published: 2025-12-04
Curated: 2025-12-04 16:22
The RPS Advent Calendar 2025 has begun! We're revealing one of our favourite games of the year every day, and our favourite of favourites on December 24th. Check the main Calendar post to see a full list of our choices so far.
Hold up all your fingers. Count them from right to left. When you get to four, stop. That is today's Advent calender number. You will not need the rest of your fingers. Please dispose of them as you see fit.
What game could prompt such a sinister overture? It can only be... Eclipsium!
Edwin: I am he of the horrible hands. I follow my horrible hands through realms of buttress and ichor. They are my everything. I waggle my digits in fishy forests, in worn-down waiting rooms with chuckling radios. I hold them up to heavenly abattoirs and send them rummaging through the innards of the sun.
I have no need of my other parts - out they come and off they go, held glistening in my fist. My hands are everything. They can be my everything. Where necessary, I alter them. I make my pinkie into a carving knife. I make my palm into a peekhole so that I can scry my way through the harsh places.
At intervals, I see Her. She burns by the wayside and leans over the horizon, unblinking. Soon, I will - I must - hold her hands in my hands. But first, I must follow my hands into somebody's restless intestine. The polyps jitter from the light, neither glitch nor flesh, plump and pixelated and amorous.
Eclipsium is three or four hours of beautiful, sorrowful hell. You are the Wanderer, a creature pursuing the kaleidoscopic image of a woman through terrible dreams. There are jumpy bits and some arcane puzzles, but they don't exist for the satisfaction of solving them; mostly, you just keep tunnelling into the world in frail hope that you'll reach the other side of it.
Each layer of this Pandemonium brings a different kind of chthonic or celestial architecture. There is a love of the purely symbolic or metaphorical at play that makes me newly resentful of the crabby causality of many games that call themselves fantasies. This has been a pretty good year for genuinely surreal horror.
Also, in case it wasn't obvious, I do like the emphasis on hands. Hands are so expressive by default, and in a first-person game, they are often the only bit of your character you see. Developers should have more fun with them. Perhaps they should have slightly less fun than this. I admit, I always wince when I 'equip' my knife.
Head over to the RPS Advent Calendar 2025 to open another door!
This article was curated from Rock Paper Shotgun. All rights belong to the original publisher.