There was a time when some of my favorite video games barely required reflexes, which is becoming a welcome treat again these days. They did require something else, though: curiosity. I grew up on games like Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, and Freddi Fish, and they taught an entire generation of children that every object on the screen was potentially worth clicking. Maybe it would advance the story, maybe it would reveal a clue, or maybe clicking something in the background would make a character do something completely ridiculous for five seconds before returning to whatever they were doing. But it didn’t really matter, since the reward was finding out. Those games made their worlds feel interactive long before I understood phrases like “environmental storytelling” or “player agency.” I simply knew that if something looked interesting, I wanted to poke it. Then, as I got older, point-and-click games became stranger. Games like Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Grim Fandango, and countless others took that same basic instinct and started applying increasingly absurd logic to it. Your inventory became a portable junk drawer filled with objects that would eventually solve problems no sane human being could reasonably anticipate, and somehow, that was part of the charm. Let’s click in!
Allogloom feels like it remembers both sides of that genre. It has the curiosity of those childhood adventures, the occasionally unhinged logic of the classics, and the hand-drawn personality that made clicking around a room entertaining even when you weren’t progressing. Except now the friendly talking fish are gone; instead, we have missing people, unsettling traditions, and a worrying number of golden moths. Basically, imagine if Freddi Fish grew up, got into folk horror, and came back deeply suspicious of the entire town; I guess that gets you surprisingly close.
Welcome to Gruesome Grove
You play as Nora, who returns to Gruesome Grove after receiving a mysterious note and discovers that the place she once knew has developed a rather serious problem. People are disappearing, which is obviously inconvenient. More concerning, the deeper you look, the more Gruesome Grove starts to feel like a place that’s spent a long time convincing itself everything is perfectly normal. Spoiler alert: it isn’t. At first, the oddities are almost charming. The people are eccentric, the conversations have that slightly exaggerated adventure-game quality, and there is enough humor underneath everything that I initially treated most of the stranger details as part of the game’s personality. That’s another reason the Humongous Entertainment comparison kept returning to me, because in something like Pajama Sam, bizarre behavior is simply how the world works. A talking piece of furniture or a character with an impossibly specific problem doesn’t require explanation because the game establishes absurdity as normal from the beginning. Allogloom plays with that expectation. You see something strange and initially think: Well, yes, I’m playing a point-and-click game, of course this person is odd, and yes, there is a bizarre tradition. And of course everyone has very specific opinions about moths. It almost has a Midsommar-like quality: everyone inside the community seems considerably more comfortable with its traditions than the outsider looking in. Then, gradually, you realize that the game might actually want you to be uncomfortable, and that is when it clicked. The weirdness stops being just there to be pretty; it becomes evidence. I still wanted to click on everything, but I became increasingly unsure whether I actually wanted to know what I’d find.
A social experiment with wings
That tonal transition is probably my favorite thing about Allogloom. Gruesome Grove began to feel less like a traditional adventure-game setting and more like a long-running social experiment. Take a small community, give it beliefs, rituals, and traditions, then leave those ideas unchallenged for long enough that nobody remembers why they exist. Now introduce somebody willing to ask questions, and lots of moths. What makes that work is that Allogloom doesn’t immediately explain what you’re supposed to think about everything. The game lets characters behave as though certain things are perfectly acceptable, while Nora, and by extension the player, starts looking at them from a different perspective. “What actually happened here?” quickly becomes the recurring question. It made me think less about supernatural horror and more about the uncomfortable ways communities normalize behavior. How much do people accept simply because everyone around them does, and when does tradition stop being meaningful and become an excuse for never asking questions? And perhaps most importantly: when something clearly feels wrong, how many people need to pretend otherwise before pretending becomes normal? I’m not suggesting Allogloom suddenly turns into a psychological research paper with a moth on the cover, since the game remains funny, weird, and frequently playful. But those ideas give the mystery considerably more weight than I initially expected. The horror doesn’t come from something jumping out of a cupboard; it comes from gradually realizing the cupboard has been there for decades, and apparently nobody thought opening it was a good idea.
Mechanically, this is still very much an old-school point-and-click adventure. You explore environments, talk to characters, collect items, and gradually figure out how the various pieces fit together. That sounds simple, but the genre has always lived or died on one thing: does the player actually want to interact with the world? Luckily, Allogloom absolutely passed that test for me. I clicked on things simply because I wanted to know what Nora would say. That’s the same habit Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish encouraged years ago, where half the fun came from discovering an animation or joke that had absolutely nothing to do with solving the game. The difference is tone: in Pajama Sam, clicking something in the background might trigger a funny animation; in Allogloom, clicking the wrong suspicious object might teach you something that makes a previously harmless character feel significantly less harmless. That makes observation important in two different ways: you’re searching for puzzle pieces, but you’re also reading the world. And that’s where the art becomes enormously important. Everything is hand-drawn and slightly exaggerated, with enough Art Nouveau influence to give Gruesome Grove its own visual identity. Characters have wonderfully expressive animations, while environments are detailed without becoming so cluttered that they lose readability. More importantly, the style can move between charming and unsettling without feeling like the game suddenly changed genres, and I applaud the developer for that, because that consistency is difficult to pull off. The game doesn’t need to suddenly desaturate everything or throw blood across the screen to tell you the mood has changed; it can do that when necessary, sure, but most of the transformation comes from context. The images haven’t necessarily changed; your understanding of them has, and that’s eerie.
And then you start threatening your inventory
Ah yes, Allogloom also remembers another proud point-and-click tradition: having absolutely no idea what to do next. Eventually, the elegant investigation stops, and you start using random objects on random things because you have absolutely no idea what the game expects. We’ve all been there. You understand the larger problem, and you know what you’re trying to accomplish, where all the steps are there in your mind, but you simply don’t know which tiny step is currently preventing progress. Did I miss some new dialogue or is there an object I’ve overlooked? Maybe I’m supposed to revisit an area I’ve already swept over five times with the cursor? This is where the warm nostalgia for classic adventure games gets a little less warm. There is a very specific stage of point-and-click desperation where rational thought disappears completely. You stop asking: “What would Nora logically do?” and start asking: “Can I use this completely unrelated object on that wall?” No? Fine, what about this person? Still no? Well, excellent. We are now roughhousing the game. Allogloom occasionally slips into that territory, where most of its puzzles are satisfying because their logic becomes obvious once you understand the solution. You get that classic little moment where something clicks in your brain, and you immediately understand what the designer wanted you to see. The weaker moments happen when progress becomes unclear, rather than when the puzzle itself is difficult. A clever puzzle makes me feel stupid until I solve it, whereas an unclear progression path makes me wonder whether I’ve accidentally missed a trigger somewhere. Thankfully, those moments are the exception, not the rule.
My playthrough took roughly seven hours and I don’t think the game needed to be much longer than that. Allogloom sets up its mystery, gives you enough time to get to know Gruesome Grove and the people living there, asks a few interesting questions and then simply reaches its ending. It never felt like it was stretching things out just because a modern game is apparently supposed to keep you busy for weeks. Seven hours also feels strangely nostalgic for a point-and-click adventure. A lot of the games I remember from the genre weren’t enormous either. You entered a weird little world, picked up some equally weird objects, solved a bunch of problems and eventually reached the ending while still thinking about some of it afterwards. Allogloom gave me that same feeling, and because it isn’t thirty hours long, going back for missed interactions or achievements doesn’t sound like a chore. I could actually see myself replaying it for another reason too. The first time through, most of my attention went towards figuring out what was happening. On a second run, I would already know the answer, so I’d probably notice a lot more of the hints that were sitting there the whole time. Looking at the achievements, I’m pretty sure I missed quite a few things anyway, so that might be enough to pull me back in.
Is this really the end?
The one place where I was left slightly unsure was the ending; because it leaves enough open that my immediate reaction was less “that’s the end” and more: Wait. Are we coming back here? Some ambiguity suits a game like this. Explaining every strange corner of Gruesome Grove would probably damage the atmosphere more than it would help, and not every moth needs a PowerPoint presentation, but the world feels large enough, and its ideas distinctive enough, that I genuinely started wondering whether Allogloom is one story or the beginning of several. There is enough left unexplored that another adventure wouldn’t feel like reopening something that already had a perfectly neat ending. It would feel like opening another door in a building where we’ve only explored a few rooms, and after spending seven hours being trained to click suspicious doors? Yes, obviously I’m going through.
Conclusion
So, to conclude! What surprised me most about Allogloom is how much it reminded me of the point-and-click games I played when I was younger, without ever feeling childish. A straight line runs from the curiosity that made me click everything in Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, or Freddi Fish to the curiosity that kept pulling me deeper into Gruesome Grove and the world around it. The difference is what waits on the other side of the click. Those childhood games rewarded curiosity with jokes, animations, and friendly characters; Allogloom sometimes rewards it with something you probably wish you didn’t know, and I mean that as a compliment. Perhaps that’s why the comparison to those childhood adventures feels so correct. Allogloom feels like the genre grew up alongside the people who played them. The curiosity is still there, as are the strange characters and the inventory full of seemingly useless nonsense, but the questions are different now, and the answers can be considerably more uncomfortable. It reminded me why I used to click on absolutely everything in Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, and Freddi Fish, without ever wanting to replay any of those games. We’re older now, and the moths grew up with us. Allogloom is definitely one of those point-and-click games I’ll recommend for years to come.