review

By flotsam

MoonHood / Fast Travel Games

I do like stop motion claymation, so The Midnight Walk was a no brainer to play. I liked even more that it turned out to be absolutely excellent.

Before I try and tell you things less emotively, I am going to briefly gush. Everything about this game sings; the visuals, the soundtrack, the story and the walk itself. It is sad and beautiful and grim and hopeful. It delighted me and frustrated me and enthralled me. It sucked me in, and I loved it.

Normal service will now be resumed.

You play the Burnt One, who having borrowed some eyes and some ears heads off into the world. A quest awaits, one leading to Moon Mountain. The journey is littered with tribulations and stories, and the world is a dark place. Monsters dwell, shambling and shaking, and you will run and hide and even blink in order to avoid them. Matches and candles will be an illuminating staple, sometimes opening new paths, sometimes just providing a bit of cheer, perhaps even stopping you from freezing to death.

Fire walk with me.

Which it does, once you find Potboy, a clay companion with a fiery head. Feed him coal, re-light his fire should it go out. He becomes both your companion and your willing accomplice, and is pivotal in making your way through the six chapters that await.

You might play the Burnt One, but I thought Potboy was almost the centre of things. He will do your bidding - lighting fires, heating furnaces, wriggling through pipes, jumping on stuff - but take the time to sit back and just watch him frolic on his own. He is engaging in his own right, and might also indicate e.g., when a monster approaches. All hail Potboy!

And then there is Housy, another companion as house-y as it sounds. It follows along, assuming you can keep the way clear, and is involved in the happenings more than once. It is also the repository of the collectible things you might find. I rarely care about collectibles but here, for various reasons, I wanted to find them all (I didn’t quite). More of that later.

I have already said that stop-motion animation rings my bells, but the world of the Burnt One is a visual treat. Tim Burton meets Grim Fandango might be one description, and there is a nightmarish Grimm-fairytale feel to things. The lumpiness of the clay gives added texture and almost a vibrancy to the character modelling, assisted by their colourings. What then helps to make it shine is all the little bits and pieces. Fire plays a big part, and the flickering shadows that result is an obvious aspect. Environmental effects abound, but take the time to observe the things you might otherwise just walk past. The attention to detail can be extraordinary; the Vichy-labelled tin that one character is sitting on is just one example.

I also mentioned monsters, and there are a few different ones. Something will chase you in the first chapter, which will put you on notice that this isn’t a casual walk. Some you can just run away from, others can be avoided by creeping and when necessary hiding (wardrobes are a sign that hiding might be required), and some can be vanquished just by closing your eyes - what you can’t see might not be able to hurt you. If caught you will die but will simply respawn in the nearest coffin, and whilst it isn’t a hard game, you will likely have to do some sequences more than a few times, not just to avoid the monsters but to work out what it is you need to do in order to move on.

Environmental puzzles are also part of your journey, many involving fire. Some require the use of a Matchlock, a kind of hand-held cannon that can shoot matchsticks across a distance to ignite things you can’t otherwise reach. Some involve a bit of timing e.g., do some stuff before other stuff burns out/finds you/etc. and closing your eyes and following sounds are an element in others. Finding things isn’t limited to collectibles; keys are important but so too are e.g., missing bones and pot shards. There are also a few out and out puzzles.

You can play with subtitles but I thought they distracted from the story telling so I turned them off, and let the impressive voice acting do all the narrative lifting. Much is revealed through tales told by other characters, both through cutscenes and direct conversation, as well as by a narrator, but many collectibles have a roll to play as well.

It was one of the reasons why I was keen to find them. You can finish the game without them, but they all provide a degree of added depth to the stories or the lore, and some have a more obvious narrative quality to them (the Shellphones and the Murkle Story Reels for instance). There are four different types, and nearly 60 different individual items, and you will come to recognise the places they can be found.

Very helpfully given their number, they are archived and stored inside Housy, and the way they are displayed and presented helped make them a compelling feature. More than that, you will find things that can best be appreciated (e.g., playing one of the vinyl records) or indeed appreciated at all (viewing the Murkle reels) during the calmness of being inside Housy. You will also be able to ascertain in which chapter any missing item can be found.

It's worth mentioning that the Murkle reels are part of a single whole, telling a tale about who took the sun away. It is relevant to the bigger goings on, and how many of the 15 reels you find will determine how complete a tale you can reveal. As I said though, finding them is not necessary in order to finish the game.

You can visit Housy anytime from the menu, and at other times from within the game. Don’t pass up the opportunity.

The soundtrack I usually turn right down but here I left it turned up, as its orchestral tones (be they quiet and almost calming, or brooding and frenetic) both underpinned and amplified the endeavours. Ambient sound is as good as the rest of the game, and taken as a whole, it demands to be played in a dark room using headphones. It isn’t a scary game, but it can get a bit tense avoiding or vanquishing a creature, and there will likely be a jump-scare or two.

Each of the chapters has its own tale to tell (e.g., The Tale of the Loathsome Molgrim, The Tale of the Craftsman’s Heart) but they felt like a connected whole. The final chapter will see you at Moon Mountain, where you have a choice to make, and there are two endings depending on that choice. Conveniently, having seen your original ending, you can just choose ‘resume’ from the menu to generate the different ending.

You can’t save at will but it does save fairly regularly, and if you die and respawn and find you need to replay a short portion to get back to where you were, you will still have any collectibles you found before your demise.

It plays in the first person and predominantly uses the keyboard (the mouse steers your character, the keyboard does everything else). A little icon will be generated at a hotspot, along with an indication of the relevant keyboard key. Whilst you can examine and even equip items in your inventory, I found that just having an item caused it to be used. About the only grumblement I had was that mapping the keys was supposed to be do-able but wasn’t possible.

It took me a bit over 12 hours and I had a ball from beginning to end.

I played on:

OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit

Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz

RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB

Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB

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