‘The Midnight Walk’ Review – An Artfully Grotesque and Occasionally Beautiful Walking Simulator

The Midnight Stroll is like taking a stroll via Tim Burton’s thoughts. As a sport its visuals are completely distinctive and darkly lovely, however is there sufficient to do alongside your stroll to warrant placing on the headset? Learn on to seek out out.

The Midnight Stroll Particulars:

Writer: Quick Journey Video games
Developer: MoonHood
Obtainable On: Steam (VR non-obligatory), PS5 (VR non-obligatory)
Reviewed On: Quest 3 through Steam Hyperlink
Launch Date: Could eighth, 2025
Value: $40

Gameplay

The Midnight Stroll, because the title implies, falls fairly squarely into the ‘strolling simulator’ style, leaning totally on its visuals and narrative to hold pretty fundamental gameplay involving mild puzzles and the occasional hide-and-seek with monsters.

The principle draw is certainly the sport’s distinctive artwork fashion, by which the builders say they hand-crafted almost the entire belongings after which 3D scanned them for use within the sport. The result’s a darkish, Burtonesque world that’s each artfully grotesque and infrequently lovely.

Seeing all of it up shut in VR is a really cool option to expertise the work this will need to have taken. You successfully play a personality the scale of a mouse, so you’ll be able to see all of the nice textures and floor particulars of the objects up shut. Constantly good consideration to lighting and composition means there’s at all times one thing visually intriguing to have a look at alongside your method.

Although the sport is pitched as that includes ‘cease movement’ animations, solely elements of the sport are accomplished in that fashion. Most of the animations are accomplished with clean interpolation, even in the identical sequence of motions from the identical character. The jarring mixture of each types sadly appears to be like awkward, nearly like an unintended bug.

The Midnight Stroll’s gameplay actually by no means expands past fundamental puzzling and the occasional hide-and-seek sequences with some delightfully twisted creatures. I by no means had any of these ‘eureka’ moments with the puzzles, nor any set-piece gameplay sequences that felt actually memorable. There’s additionally little or no that might be thought-about ‘VR native’ gameplay… the hallmark of many video games designed to be playable on each flatscreen and in VR.

The Midnight Stroll isn’t fairly scary sufficient to be known as a horror sport, regardless of the general imagery being that of an extended forgotten nightmare.

Whereas fundamental gameplay that’s in the end in service to the visuals and narrative isn’t at all times a nasty factor (in any case, I fairly loved Pricey Esther [2012]), the sport’s story feels poetic and obtuse.

It’s informed by many alternative unnamed narrators, and didn’t set up any characters that I felt connected to. It’s cryptic nature didn’t resonate with me personally, which meant it wasn’t a lot of a drive to hold me ahead within the sport or make me really feel invested on the planet.

With fundamental gameplay and an obtuse narrative, the sport stands largely on its distinctive and well-crafted visuals; my most important purpose for persevering with to play was to see—actually see—what would come subsequent.

Immersion

I respect that we now have the choice of seeing the sport’s darkly lovely world up shut and private via a headset. However the lack of VR native gameplay means the sport doesn’t really feel like a ‘should play’ in VR.

For example, at a number of factors within the sport if you discover a key to open a door, you don’t even get to bodily put the important thing into the keyhole and switch the lock You merely pull it out of your stock and it floats into place and magically unlocks the door for you.

At varied moments within the sport you’re requested to hold onto a bar connected to a flying machine which whisks you from one place to a different. Do you attain up and seize the bar together with your hand to hold onto it with out falling? In fact not… you simply ‘Press A’ to magically connect to the machine whereas it flies you to the subsequent location. Do you attain out together with your hand and open the door to enter your home? In fact not, simply ‘Press A’.

It’s these particulars—these missed alternatives for hands-on interactions—which are so usually an indicator of VR-optional design, and sadly detracts from immersion.

The closest factor within the sport to VR native gameplay is the power to shut your eyes and ‘hear’ for the path of audio cues that might information you to sure key issues within the atmosphere (or change elements of the atmosphere if you happen to have been taking a look at them earlier than you closed your eyes).

On PSVR 2 I take it this is able to be achieved by truly closing your eyes (because of the headset’s eye-tracking), however on PC VR (as I performed it), ‘closing your eyes’ was accomplished by holding a set off as a substitute.

Whereas the PSVR 2 model would have been a bit extra immersive, the mechanic was by no means utilized in a method that felt notably compelling.

Consolation

Whereas The Midnight Stroll in VR is mostly comfy because of sluggish motion, the sport steadily grabs maintain of the participant’s head throughout cutscenes, often panning slowly, however often sweeping your view throughout a big space. Typically in these scenes the horizon is purposefully tilted. For some these moments could also be uncomfortable. For me they have been rare sufficient to be just a little jarring however not outright uncomfortable.