Your gluttonous desire for all of those delicious dots will undoubtedly be your undoing in EAT GIRL. Is such a morsel really worth your life?
You might be getting a Pac-Man Championship Edition vibe from EAT GIRL, but more like if you were playing the arcade cabinet in Silent Hill. The game focuses on planning and careful, fast movements if you hope to collect all of those tasty dots. As you do so, it may be hard to ignore the surreal, uncomfortable mood that comes from the visuals and music. This is a puzzle game at its heart, but there’s something dark also stirring within its chambers.
You’ll move through several styles of puzzle over the game’s two-to-three hour span (if you’re good at it), finding all sorts of mechanisms that will teleport you or alter your movement, as well as monsters that behave in a variety of ways that you’ll have to avoid. All quite clever stuff that provides a lot of challenge for those who love dodging ghosts and collecting dots in a maze.
Again, though, there’s the grim sense that you’re moving deeper into a place you shouldn’t be going, the dots serving as a lure to drag a hungry being further and further into a broken, disturbed reality. These decaying mazes seem to hold something that is watching you creep ever closer, with disturbing songs and effects following you as you move through the game. EAT GIRL does an excellent job of pushing the horror of Pac-Man to the fore, making for an intriguing experience in mood and atmosphere.
EAT GIRL is available now on itch.io.