Review: The Midnight Walk (PSVR2)

The Midnight Walk is a beautifully poignant kind of experience. It’s one filled with misery, heartbreak, and sorrow — all personified by the game’s impeccable claymation visual design. But it’s one you need to let wash over you before its true brilliance begins to show — and for us, it almost never managed it.

The Midnight Walk follows the tale of The Burned One (the player) and Pot Boy, as they venture to Moon Mountain to spread flames and reignite the sun. But on their journey, the duo will uncover “tales”: stories ranging from a town of decapitated heads to a craftsman pushing his daughter to rule when all she wants to do is dance.

When we first booted up the game, we were impressed by its distinct visual style. The claymation effect is fantastically done, and any screenshot of the game could come straight from A Nightmare Before Christmas or The Corpse’s Bride. Twisted, malformed buildings, crooked wave-like mountains, decomposing beings with raspy voices — it’s masterfully done.

The creature designs will likely stay with us for some time. The Grinners are particularly great as their Cheshire cat smiles are as chilling as their unblinking eyes. But, it’s also the animation style that encapsulates the clay design even better, with twitchy movement and crunching sound design bringing The Midnight Walk’s inhabitants to life.

However, despite its visual brilliance, the game really fails to grip you in its opening hour or so. It’s a very simple game mechanically, with rudimentary stealth sections and very little player involvement beyond commanding Pot Boy to light candles. If you’re like us, you’ll find those early hours lack the hook.

Thankfully, though, something happened as we wrapped up our first tale, where we learned of a violent history between the heads of Nobodyville and a creature called the Molgrim. While haunting and eerie in design and essence, something beautiful emerged from The Midnight Walk’s form of storytelling, which included gravelly narration and slow-panning visuals swept up in a melancholic score.

From then on out, The Midnight Walk just clicked for us, where we weren’t thinking about the lacking mechanics or the simplistic level design. Each new level of the game introduces a new area that lets us explore a hauntingly beautiful vista, embrace a story quite often centred around grief, and have the score wash over us. The score genuinely gives Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a run for its money, with one of the best soundtracks you’ll hear this year.

While The Midnight Walk is entirely playable in flat screen, a lot of its magic is brought to life in VR. This is a game made with PSVR2 in mind, and it goes beyond immersing you in its visuals. There is the usual jank that comes with the medium, which we’ll get into, but easily the game’s coolest feature is a blink mechanic.

Used to either listen for hidden objects or activate glowing eyes which can open passageways, you can close your eyes at the press of a button, or on Sony’s headset, physically close your eyes. It leads to some truly chilling moments, like luring horrid creatures towards you and closing your eyes just in time as you hear their screeches. Or our favourite: having your environment change around you in the literal blink of an eye.

This mechanic mixed in with darker levels, which require you to hold a match up for light, makes for some nerve-wracking sections amidst the emotional turmoil of its world. It’s never quite as engrossing as some of the spine-tingling moments in other VR titles like Metro Awakening, but we loved it nonetheless.

Sadly, the VR version of the game does suffer some technical drawbacks. For one, the visuals can be quite rough, with character models adorned by jagged edges. This only really comes to the forefront during the game’s version of cutscenes, where it moves away from your first-person perspective. Thankfully, this isn’t an issue for the most part, with many of the game’s levels and vistas leaving us in awe of their crooked beauty.

However, there were several sections — primarily in the early hours of the game — that led to frustrating glitches and full restarts. Lit matches could at times freeze in place, especially when using the cannon. Eventually, we figured out that the cannon would cause the matches to wiggle around before being consumed, but it was clunky, awkward, and not clearly signposted.

Then, in some sections where Pot Boy is required to light candles, the button prompt simply wouldn’t appear. We had to switch to flat screen one time to amend this. Thankfully, outside of the first hour or so, this didn’t happen again.

If you’re looking for a smoother experience, then the flat screen version is there for all who fancy it. We reckon the flat screen version still brings across the emotional core of its experience, but it does lack the edge that VR offers. Its creatures just aren’t as imposing and its vistas aren’t as awe-inspiring. And while that’s not always a dealbreaker — it’s par for the course with VR versus flat screen — the visuals are very much a part of the identity of The Midnight Walk, so the flatscreen version just isn’t quite as moving.

Conclusion

As we rolled credits on The Midnight Walk, any issues we had technically or otherwise had long since faded away. Instead, what stood out to us was the game’s haunting world filled with pensive storylines, impactful visuals, and an emotionally weighty score.

If you’re expecting an engaging survival horror gameplay experience, you won’t find it here. That may have been what we were looking for as we first played the game — especially considering the VR format. But what we got instead was memorable, moving, and evocatively melancholic. The Midnight Walk is not a game we’ll forget anytime soon.