Allogloom, a Strange Horticulture heir, shows one painter can build a whole haunted town

Point-and-click adventures have always been a painter’s genre. The camera rarely moves, so the frame has to hold you, and the best of them, from the gothic sketchbook of Fran Bow to the plant-shop shelves of Strange Horticulture, are remembered as places before they are remembered as puzzles. Allogloom takes that idea to its limit. Every background, character and creature in its haunted town of Gruesome Grove was painted from scratch by one artist, the solo developer Kate, who works under the label Galactic Ghosty, and the game’s quiet argument is that a world drawn by a single hand can keep its secrets better than one built by committee.

The premise is a child’s nightmare told with a straight face. Nora finds that the residents of her town have vanished, taken by monsters, and the only witnesses left are the moths. Across eight chapters she gathers clues, pockets the strange relics the missing abandoned, bargains with peculiar neighbours and with things that are not neighbours at all, and follows the trail beyond Gruesome Grove into six interconnected worlds. The publisher, Iceberg Interactive, pitches it as cozy, character-driven exploration with something colder running underneath, and the screenshots bear that out: candlelit mushroom cottages, a moth carved into a shrine door, a pile of severed toes left on a doorstep like a parcel.

Nora outside a mushroom-covered cottage door in Gruesome Grove, beside a grisly pile of toes — Image: Galactic Ghosty / Iceberg Interactive

What interests me is where the puzzles live. In the announcement, the studio frames them as woven into the town’s lore and its inhabitants, rewarding curiosity and close attention over trial and error. That is the right instinct. The oldest complaint about the genre is moon logic, the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle; the cure has always been to make the answer something the world has already told you, if you were listening. A town whose harrowing history is hidden in plain sight is a structure built for exactly that kind of listening.

The company it keeps matters too. Iceberg, the Dutch indie label founded in 2009, is the house behind Strange Horticulture and Strange Antiquities, two of the most admired occult puzzle games of recent years, alongside the Killing Floor series and Chivalry 2. Kate, the studio says, spent years teaching herself illustration, game design, writing and animation to bring Gruesome Grove to life, with a handful of collaborators along the way. The free demo on Steam has already drawn players who reach for Fran Bow as their comparison, which is about as specific a compliment as this corner of the medium hands out.

Nora faces a hooded statue wrapped by a pale tentacled creature above a pile of treasure — Image: Galactic Ghosty / Iceberg Interactive

Allogloom launches on Steam for PC on 13 October 2026, timed for the Halloween season, and the demo is available on its store page now. Review codes for press and creators are due closer to launch.

Whether one painter’s town can hold its dread across eight chapters is something only the full release will answer. The bet itself is clear, and it is an old one renewed: in a genre built on looking, the world that rewards a closer look is the one that keeps you.

Tags: indie games, Allogloom, Fran Bow, Galactic Ghosty, Iceberg Interactive, point-and-click adventures