I'm always on the lookout for something a bit different in the indie-game world and every now and then that something different ends up being really good. I would be lying if I didn't say that most indie games that try to "break the mold" end up being pretty crap though and The Midnight Walk, although beautiful and creepy, is repetitive, slow, and boring too early on for me to really want to continue playing it.
When i watched the demo and even when I first started playing it I was pretty excited because the art style, whatever that is called, is extremely well done. It reminds me of The Nightmare Before Christmas graphics from the film that is so famous, and this really appealed to me.
That picture looks blurry because you start the game out with everything being blurry on purpose. There is also no sound and this is because your character, the nameless character that you are playing, has no eyes and no ears until he is granted them by whatever the hell this is. It's all very creepy, shaky, and in a way very very cool. This is what drew me in to wanting to actually play it.
You are walking through this nightmarish land that looks like a Tool music video from the 90's and doing so to a jazz-sounding soundtrack that is really unlike anything I have ever seen in a videogame before and again, this really appealed to me.
They do unusual things like make you look for something by closing your eyes and listening to where you are supposed to go and this was fine until the noise outside my windows in real life started to interfere with my ability to progress. That's ok though! That's not the game's fault that I have a sometimes noisy street outside my window and it is the one time of the year where it is comfortable from a temperature standpoint to have your windows open.
You quickly encounter creepy creatures, some friend, some foe, with your pack of matches that you light up and need to get new ones in order to light things on fire such as this fire-pit and also candles that you encounter along the way.
The pack of matches thing was really neat until I had been forced to light more and more candles on fire for the 27th time in a row.
I don't know what the deal was here but I guess they didn't really have much in the way of plans as far as what you and your character are actually going to do because for about and hour, that was the only thing I did.
It's quite creepy actually and you can kind of see this character that you are meant to avoid that is peeking around this corner I am ducked behind at the moment of this screencap. He is cool and very oddly terrifying but it is at this point that I realized that stealth is a big part of the next 20 minutes of gameplay and likely a big part of all the rest of the game.
This is where my personal bias has lead me to talk down about this game so much. I loathe stealth games and won't play them. If a game has stealth-optional sections I will normally not opt to stealth. So the fact that this game is already establishing that you MUST do stealth, often with the same stinkin' enemy over and over again, I was getting bored really fast.
There isn't much consequence for the creature discovering you and the game loads your checkpoint really fast, so I will give credit to the devs for that part of it. If it HAD taken a while to load I likely would have bailed on this game far sooner than the 2 hours or so that I managed to make it.
So what happens now? Well you light more matches, keep opening doors in the dismal landscape, hide from baddies, then make your way through some sort of locked area by lighting a bunch of candles and then on the other side you get to do it again!.
They mix things up a bit by having you meet this guy and after you feed him some coal he decides to follow you around and now you can hit the square button in order to get him to activate things that are blocking your path. One or two? nah, dozens in a row. There is no mystery here. You are lighting candles and sending whatever this guy is to places in the distance that are normally also candles or something else to be lit on fire and then you hide from a monster long enough to get past him, open a door, and then do the same thing on the other side.
later you get to hide from monsters in wardrobes as they slowly walk by and yes, that is as lame as it sounds especially after you are doing it for the 10th time in 15 minutes.
This game was meant to be played in VR and I would be willing to bet that this adds a lot to the overall experience. I can't comment on that because I refuse to purchase a peripheral that costs more than the console it is attached to. The wildly unsuccessful sales figures of the PS5-VR would indicate that most other users feel the same way as I do.
I made it about 2 hours into playing this game and unfortunately there just isn't any variety in gameplay. You only do about 4 or 5 things that I ever experienced and regardless of what the visual look is like, this is not gameplay really, this is just some sort of moving art exhibit that you get to take part in every now and then.
I paid nothing for this game and don't know what it costs. I would really enjoy seeing the developers maybe work their visual magic and hire some other people to give them ideas on what to do with it. Doing the same tasks with slightly different surroundings just isn't enough variety for a guy like me and I honestly would rather watch some YouTuber do the entire game in a 4 hour stream than actually play it.
Most critics agreed that the game was mechanically simple and unambitious
I agree with that. In this day and age it takes a lot more than just good graphics and sound to impress me - you have to have a game that is actually fun to play and unfortunately for this game, it just isn't fun to play.
MoonHood Studios is so new on the scene that they don't even have a wiki yet and I hope this game sold well enough that they continue and perhaps get some dramatically better mechanics and gameplay ideas on whatever the heck it is that they do next. This was a good display of what they can do visually, now they just need to make the next one be something fun.
Good graphics do not make a good game and The Midnight Walk is a fantastic example of this notion in practice.
non-credited images are screengrabs from my own gameplay