The Midnight Stroll is a superbly poignant type of expertise. It’s one crammed with distress, heartbreak, and sorrow — all personified by the sport’s impeccable claymation visible design. But it surely’s one you could let wash over you earlier than its true brilliance begins to indicate — and for us, it nearly by no means managed it.
The Midnight Stroll follows the story of The Burned One (the participant) and Pot Boy, as they enterprise to Moon Mountain to unfold flames and reignite the solar. However on their journey, the duo will uncover “tales”: tales starting from a city of decapitated heads to a craftsman pushing his daughter to rule when all she needs to do is dance.
Once we first booted up the sport, we had been impressed by its distinct visible type. The claymation impact is fantastically executed, and any screenshot of the sport might come straight from A Nightmare Earlier than Christmas or The Corpse Bride. Twisted, malformed buildings, crooked wave-like mountains, decomposing beings with raspy voices — it’s masterfully executed.
The creature designs will doubtless stick with us for a while. The Grinners are notably nice as their Cheshire cat smiles are as chilling as their unblinking eyes. However, it’s additionally the animation type that encapsulates the clay design even higher, with twitchy motion and crunching sound design bringing The Midnight Stroll’s inhabitants to life.
Nevertheless, regardless of its visible brilliance, the sport actually fails to grip you in its opening hour or so. It’s a quite simple sport mechanically, with rudimentary stealth sections and little or no participant involvement past commanding Pot Boy to gentle candles. In the event you’re like us, you’ll discover these early hours lack the hook.
Fortunately, although, one thing occurred as we wrapped up our first story, the place we discovered of a violent historical past between the heads of Nobodyville and a creature referred to as the Molgrim. Whereas haunting and eerie in design and essence, one thing stunning emerged from The Midnight Stroll’s type of storytelling, which included gravelly narration and slow-panning visuals swept up in a melancholic rating.
From then on out, The Midnight Stroll simply clicked for us, the place we weren’t fascinated by the missing mechanics or the simplistic stage design. Every new stage of the sport introduces a brand new space that lets us discover a hauntingly stunning vista, embrace a narrative very often centred round grief, and have the rating wash over us. The rating genuinely offers Clear obscure: Expedition 33 a run for its cash, with among the best soundtracks you’ll hear this yr.
Whereas The Midnight Stroll is fully playable in flat display screen, plenty of its magic is dropped at life in VR. It is a sport made with PSVR2 in thoughts, and it goes past immersing you in its visuals. There’s the same old jank that comes with the medium, which we’ll get into, however simply the sport’s coolest characteristic is a blink mechanic.
Used to both hear for hidden objects or activate glowing eyes which might open passageways, you may shut your eyes on the press of a button, or on Sony’s headset, bodily shut your eyes. It results in some actually chilling moments, like luring horrid creatures in direction of you and shutting your eyes simply in time as you hear their screeches. Or our favorite: having your surroundings change round you within the literal blink of an eye fixed.
This mechanic combined in with darker ranges, which require you to carry a match up for gentle, makes for some nerve-wracking sections amidst the emotional turmoil of its world. It’s by no means fairly as engrossing as among the spine-tingling moments in different VR titles like Metro Awakeninghowever we beloved it nonetheless.
Sadly, the VR model of the sport does endure some technical drawbacks. For one, the visuals could be fairly tough, with character fashions adorned by jagged edges. This solely actually involves the forefront throughout the sport’s model of cutscenes, the place it strikes away out of your first-person perspective. Fortunately, this isn’t a difficulty for essentially the most half, with most of the sport’s ranges and vistas leaving us in awe of their crooked magnificence.
Nevertheless, there have been a number of sections — primarily within the early hours of the sport — that led to irritating glitches and full restarts. Lit matches might at occasions freeze in place, particularly when utilizing the cannon. Finally, we found out that the cannon would trigger the matches to wiggle round earlier than being consumed, however it was clunky, awkward, and never clearly signposted.
Then, in some sections the place Pot Boy is required to gentle candles, the button immediate merely wouldn’t seem. We needed to swap to flat display screen one time to amend this. Fortunately, outdoors of the primary hour or so, this didn’t occur once more.
In the event you’re on the lookout for a smoother expertise, then the flat display screen model is there for all who fancy it. We reckon the flat display screen model nonetheless brings throughout the emotional core of its expertise, however it does lack the sting that VR gives. Its creatures simply aren’t as imposing and its vistas aren’t as awe-inspiring. And whereas that is not at all times a dealbreaker — it’s par for the course with VR versus flat display screen — the visuals are very a lot part of the id of The Midnight Stroll, so the flatscreen model simply isn’t fairly as transferring.
Conclusion
As we rolled credit on The Midnight Stroll, any points we had technically or in any other case had lengthy since pale away. As a substitute, what stood out to us was the sport’s haunting world crammed with pensive storylines, impactful visuals, and an emotionally weighty rating.
In the event you’re anticipating an interesting survival horror gameplay expertise, you gained’t discover it right here. That will have been what we had been on the lookout for as we first performed the sport — particularly contemplating the VR format. However what we obtained as an alternative was memorable, transferring, and evocatively melancholic. The Midnight Stroll is just not a sport we’ll overlook anytime quickly.
