You're dead and stalked by Death Stranding monsters in this indie game about grief
The screenshots and trailers on Steam(opens in new tab) don't do De-Exit: Eternal Matters any favors. This indie game, developed by SandBloom Studio, may have a cutesy voxel-based look, but it takes its subject matter very seriously.
De-Exit is a third-person adventure game set in the afterlife. You play as a blocky skeleton who wakes up in the melancholic Plane of Memory. The opening sequence sets the tone: you run and jump across platforms suspended in limbo and tiptoe around the corruption eating it all away. Skeletal lizards scurry through the grass and corpses lay frozen in their last moments.
Death and grief permeate the world despite its plucky artstyle. It may look incongruous, but in my experience with the game's first few hours, it works surprisingly well. The developer uses a quiet score and sweeping camera shots to capture a world drained of its charm. The characters you meet are bright and hopeful, and they just want to see their crumbling world repaired.
Later in the intro level, you are tasked with a short stealth section. A trail of tall grass that leads to the exit is broken by thick pockets of smoke. When you shine your light on these dark paths, inky monsters appear—a direct inspiration from Death Stranding's BTs(opens in new tab), narrative designer Julien Gatumal Fernandez told me. For what is supposed to be an easy tutorial activity, the stealth section is surprisingly tense. You can't illuminate the monsters for too long or they'll notice, and even though you can see what direction they're walking in, you're never sure if they're going to turn around and grab you.
The early puzzles ask you to find a way to push blocks around the patches of corruption. When you slide them onto glowing pads, they
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