A choice of two Midnights
Horror game release post double bill
Today, 8th May, is a day of compound darkness, for it sees the release of (at least) two games with "midnight" in the title: Midnight Special from Scared Stupid Inc, and The Midnight Walk from Moonhood. A coincidence? Absolutely not. This is clearly an occult configuration of daunting power. It's also an opportunity to briefly compare two video game aesthetics, each comparably dense, tasty and insidious.
The Midnight Walk is from them wot did animal fable Fe, which I appreciated but did not much enjoy, and Lost In Random. It casts you as a cindery explorer, The Burnt One, who must help a chibi lantern bro called Potboy through a beautifully unpleasant world of gouged and shrunken clay surfaces and twitchy, stop-motion-style creatures. "Survive and outsmart the many monsters eager to devour your little friend's flame as you experience five tales of fire and darkness, featuring an incredible cast of odd characters," the Steam page comments.
It's a first-person "dark adventure" with an emphasis on puzzling and using your noodle, but it does feature guns - hunky plasticene blunderbusses that wouldn't seem out of place in Doom, except that you appear to be very small in The Midnight Walk, small enough to sit on Doomguy's knuckle, wield a matchstick like a torch, or shelter beneath the pages of a dropped book. The world is perhaps more of a hive: you'll meet dreadful insects with hinged facemasks. I find it all quite appealing, though the stop-motion craftsmanship here feels quite sheeny and varnished next to the purposefully ramshackle splendour of, say, Judero.
Midnight Special is another keg of giblets entirely. It's a horror point-and-clicker that takes inspiration from 16-bit adventure games together with various cinematic movements and genres: "the gory thrills of giallo, the suspense of slashers, and the otherworldly charm of 70s and 80s sci-fi". The year is 1978, the place is somewhere in Maine, and you are a babysitter exploring a labyrinthine manor. It's a game of four episodes: today's early access release nets you the Pilot episode encompassing "the first half of the house", though there's currently a free Prologue demo as well.
It seems less of an enclosed dark fantasy, and more openly steeped in the material culture of various periods than The Midnight Walk. There are nods to Steamboat Willy and older Macintosh desktop displays, for example. It's also bloodier and I think, more horrible in how it couples smearier bits of pixellation with the torments of the flesh. Still, at least there are no flap-faced Burtonesque spiders. You can read more on Steam.
Please choose one of these games for further consideration and possibly, a purchase. I advise you not to play both, for there can only be one midnight. What dire cosmic consequences will you unleash, if you conjure the sunset twice over and investigate these elaborate, storied and allusive visual artefacts side by side? Don't come crying to me in the comments if tomorrow never dawns.