The Midnight Walk - Switch 2 Review
"Style over substance"
The Midnight Walk is a horror game in the same way that The Nightmare Before Christmas is a horror movie. It's beautifully and lovingly crafted, with an all-around creepy vibe, but it isn't exactly frightening. It also feels almost like a relic out of time: a very specific time from just after the indie boom, when the term “walking sim” was coined. It’s literally in the name. It’s not an especially long game and so before we end up talking about it all in the intro, let’s just get into it.
The Good
When I think about “claymation games", I can’t help but show my age and think of The Neverhood. By comparison, The Midnight Walk looks stunning and shows how we’ve come a long way in terms of technology since then, if not in what we do with that technology. It isn’t just claymation but a wonderful blend of claymation and cardboard cutouts, enhanced with computer animation techniques. It has that kind of jerky movement to things the way stop-motion animation should, while adding in lighting and particle effects that behave a little differently, giving an ethereal air to everything you look at.
The game being as short as it is (about six to seven hours, depending on how long you linger to take in the scenery), it’s difficult to discuss the narrative without spoiling things. I can say it isn’t terribly written, but it does come off as a little pretentious and uninspired. It definitely commits to the bit and tries to sell the world it’s in; indeed, learning about the world is much of the entire point of the game. It tries a little too hard to be “weird” for me and never does anything interesting or unique.
It’s not a bad story, is what I’m saying, and it at least keeps things consistent throughout in terms of quality and a build-up to pay off. If you’re the kind of person that’s into kitschy, small stories, then this is probably for you. But your mileage may vary if, for instance, you’re a seasoned horror fan that wants a story with something deeper to say that doesn’t seem to draw from every horror-adjacent franchise the creators have ever glanced at.
The result of all this is something a little familiar in its vibes and the loping landscapes it presents. The Nightmare Before Christmas wasn’t a random example earlier; the entire game feels steeped in a Burtonesque style. In that familiarity, however, it carves out a neat, bordering on unique style that takes the “ugly-cute" aesthetic to an extreme that I feel stands apart from other titles attempting to achieve the same. In the sense that true originality is dead and we’re all just riffing on the same ideas to eke out something that approaches "new", The Midnight Walk achieves this with style.
TL;DR
- Beautiful visual style
- Short and sweet
The Bad
Whatever feelings and emotions the style and presentation of The Midnight Walk might evoke, its actual game mechanics make me feel a certain way. For example, they really went with the “found recording” trope, huh? Granted, those recordings are locked into a kind of brutishly mechanised spiral shell of some description, finding a way to fit them neatly into the game’s aesthetic. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a trope exemplary of a “walking sim” game circa 2012, and it was already tired by then, having been a lazy go-to for triple-A games that had run short on either budget or imagination. And really, that’s a fitting description for the whole game.
The entire game just feels bare bones, with the puzzle and stealth elements being present feeling so light as to be entirely forgettable. Stealth sections, for instance, don’t feel like they require skill so much as basic pattern recognition; for much of it, it felt like you would need to try to fail to actually fail. Indeed, at one point about a third of the way into the game I deliberately fed myself to something just to see what would happen, since it hadn’t even happened accidentally by that point. When the game is also extremely forgiving with auto-saved checkpoints before any kind of challenge, it starts leaning very hard on “the experience” to carry everything forward. However, that’s a big ask when the story and narrative experience are just "fine".
TL;DR
- Underdeveloped gameplay
- Tired narrative tropes throughout
- Nothing unique done with the aesthetic
Final Score: 6/10
When taking the whole experience into account, The Midnight Walk is a lot of style over substance that isn’t actually that much fun to play, which can work for some. Certainly, I’m sure there are some teenagers out there playing this game right now who are preparing to craft their entire personalities around it for the next few years to come. These things come in cycles, you see. But much like those same teenagers years later when reflecting on their blunder years, as I look back on my time with The Midnight Walk, I’m already struggling to recall specific details and why they were meant to be so important. In time the cycle will continue, and another “cute horror” game will emerge to remix the familiar into something vaguely new and neat. By then, your embers will most likely have been forgotten, little Pot Boy.
Thank you for checking out our The Midnight Walk Switch review, thank you to Fast Travel Games for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
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