A theme analysis of Gylt
It’s been a while since the last time I talked about Other Things I Like, so I thought I’d tell you guys about this adventure horror game I recently watched a Let’s Play of: Gylt. It’s basically if Silent Hill was a children’s horror game and starred two cousins, the 11-year-old Sally and 7-year-old Emily. Emily ran away from home due to severe bullying, and Sally is looking for her, only to end up trapped in a nightmare dimension that’s holding her cousin captive.
This game does a thorough job of tackling its main theme, hinted at in the title: guilt. The game has three different endings, two bad ones and one golden one, all which showcase a different way of dealing with guilt. The ending is determined by the tickets Sally will be able to get on the multidimensional tram that can take her home. Depending on how thoroughly you’ve played the game, Sally will either have only one ticket or two. Spoilers from here on out.
The game's title also sounds like "gild", as in "gilded". There's a point in the game where we are shown that Sally's recollection of her relationship with Emily isn't wholly accurate. A big twist moment in the game is the revelation that Emily didn’t solely run away because of the bullying, but that the final straw was that Sally kept being friends with the kids who constantly bullied her. Sally knew her friends were bullying her cousin, but merely made excuses for them like “they’re just playing”, not taking the situation seriously and, in the end, Emily saw Sally no different from her bullies for standing by and letting it happen.
The worst ending is probably the one where Sally uses the ticket herself to escape the nightmare dimension. In this ending, she says it’s “too much” to expect her to stay in the other world just because she feels bad for Emily, and she’s not a bad person, but she also admits that she mostly wanted to find Emily so that people would stop blaming her for Emily’s disappearance. The final shot of this ending is Sally putting up missing person posters for Emily, a gesture she now knows is pointless, merely an outward appearance of penance to earn approval from others. The first ending is denying guilt.
The second ending is also a bad ending, where Sally shoves the ticket into Emily’s pocket and pushes her onto the tram, sacrificing herself for her cousin. Here Sally says she’s sorry for being “such a terrible cousin”. The final shot of this ending is Emily now putting up missing person posters for Sally, implying she will end up back in the other world sooner than later due to her survivor’s guilt. Sally harmed herself to make up for Emily’s hurt, and this ended up helping no one. The second ending is self-flagellation.
The third ending is obtained through finding all the former victims of the nightmare dimension, reading their grievances and freeing their spirits from their imprisonment with a magical stone. Each of these trapped spirits leaves behind a ticket fragment and, by collecting all of them, Sally can get an extra ticket so that both she and Emily can return home. In this ending, Sally apologizes for not being there for Emily and promises to do better in the future, and this is believable, because Sally’s mistake was not taking Emily’s problems seriously, and now she’s shown that she can take even the problems of complete strangers seriously enough to try to help them. This ending is about learning from your mistakes and doing better.
