The Midnight Walk (2025)
Take The Nightmare Before Christmas, give it a bit of a twist and put it into a game and you have The Midnight Walk. That might sound derogatory although it's not, because The Midnight Walk actually is pretty much guaranteed to be in my top 10 this year. Why? First off the game has an extremely unique visual appearance that we haven't really seen since The Neverhood and Skullmonkeys.
It stands out with its stop-motion claymation art style set on top of a full 60-90 fps normal gameplay. It might be jarring to some who didn't grow up with the bevy of 80’s stop motion like I did. Such as Will Vinton’s Claymation Holiday specials, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and the aforementioned Nightmare Before Christmas along with James and the Giant Peach, Corpse Bride and newer movies like ParaNorman and Coraline. Claymation is a really cool and interesting art direction for a video game and it's so beautiful.
Along with The Midnight Walk’s striking visual direction, it also boasts a really dark and twisted but ultimately hauntingly beautiful story. It boils down to the sun has gone out and The Burnt One is tasked with igniting it again. PotBoy; a companion joins the journey and a traveling house, called Housey tags along the main path called The Midnight Walk.
At points down the road, the path is blocked requiring a detour and thus is the main part of the game. These detours split the game into separate levels or vignettes of an overall connected world. This is where the game’s main mechanics kick in, and the whole game is traveling and solving problems of others along your journey.
One level saw a town that was plagued by a monster, and in the midst of them beheading themselves (for some reason I was never sure about) they kept getting taken and eaten. While trying to slay the beast, the backstory of the monster and the townspeople are shown, and it becomes filled with a much larger understanding of the monster’s true nature.
Another level felt a bit more linear as it was running away from monsters chasing The Burnt One and Potboy lends a hand to distract them every once in a while. But the level and story that will probably stick with me most is the empty town with the Matchstick Girl.
Stumbling upon the completely silent and ghost-like town with a talking corpse in a graveyard. He sounded like Beetlejuice and tells a story of a little girl who the town went after. Along the way, it’s revealed that the little girl was just having fun and didn’t realize that she was taking the matches which were the town’s warmth. The town follows the little girl and burns her alive and then the town is left without any warmth and they long for the warm embrace of death but can’t find it.
These small sections all tell fascinating stories on their own, and it all gets put into this beautiful wrapper of a game. I could go on and on describing every moment of this smaller indie game, but that not only would spoil all the surprises and twists, but also just end up not doing it justice. What was phenomenal about the game was that it was also a native VR game as well as being a “flat” or “Pancake” game. This not only made the game more interactive with some light puzzle solving and aiming, but just made the scope of the game’s world more pronounced and somewhat overwhelming. In a game like this, that’s exactly what you want. You want to be fully immersed in an environment that seems dripping and oozing creativity and weirdness.
Some of the mechanics felt a bit clunky, like the barely used inventory. I actually got stuck on the first interaction where I needed to open a door with a key. The inventory is accessed by reaching to the left side of the hips and grabbing it. This pops up the inventory in a hand and then uses the left stick to swap between items. To use the item, I had to grab the item with the other hand and pull it out into the real world (of the game) and then insert the key into the door. For whatever reason, it just wasn’t very intuitive, causing some frustration on my part (but this also was due to having chat in my ear trying to ask me different questions and also troubleshooting along with me).
The game itself, as a game, had just the smallest amount of technical hiccups, but nothing major. The only time I had a real technical glitch was at the very end of the game, within the last three minutes of gameplay, where a texture didn’t load right and I had to fall off a cliff and reset the area to get it to appear right. For an indie game that has a full VR implementation as well… this is an incredible feat to have the game be so polished.
The Midnight Walk is a game that I hope we see more of, and the creativity of the studio is something that needs to be applauded and celebrated more in the industry. This game, as indie as it is, is easily going to be in my top running for Game Of The Year this year, in a year that has some pretty big releases. This meant more to me than any major published game. The ingenuity, the creativity, the odd-ball quirky nature; the sometimes creepy and dark offputting setting all lend to a very beautiful and well told story. I know this isn’t going to be everyone’s style of game, but this game resonated with me in a deep and profound way. The vignettes and more subtle stories this game tells along its larger narrative is something to be shown off and praised.
I could gush over this game for hours, and will during the Game Of The Year discussions at the end of the year, but I’d rather just entice others to check it out for themselves, or experience it through my playthrough. It’s a wonderful game, a tight narrative experience with small interactions and puzzle elements. It’s more of that experience gameplay than a full blown game, and that’s ok. For a budget friendly title, it’s worth adding to your collection or library of games to reminisce about and feel good supporting a more creative and experimental game in the era of risk-averse AAA publishing.
The Midnight Walk is one of those true “gem” games. It’s special, it’s rare, it’s unique and I’ve never really played anything like it. The VR implementation didn’t need to be in the game, and the fact that it felt perfectly placed was just icing on the top. It’s a beautiful experience that will stick with me for the rest of my life when I talk about weird, different, odd games that are full of creativity. It’s really this generation's Psychonauts, and that’s pretty much the highest praise I can give to any game ever.