The Midnight Walk Review
MoonHood and Fast Travel Games’ The Midnight Walk is a haunting journey through a world engulfed in darkness and an unforgettable experience.
The Midnight Walk. MoonHood / Fast Travel Games
The Midnight Walk from MoonHood and Fast Travel Games is a beautiful, hand-crafted adventure, a journey through a dark fairytale that is both frightening and moving. The stealth gameplay and light puzzle solving aren’t as impressive as the evocative, atmospheric clay world and the stories therein. Still, The Midnight Walk is a haunting experience that will stay with me long after its short playtime.
The Midnight Walk. MoonHood / Fast Travel Games
As the Burnt One, you set off on the road in a world of eternal night. Fire is precious, and the vile creatures that wander are hungry for it. Soon, you meet Potboy, an innocent, living being made of pottery and able to carry fire with him. Your quest becomes to bring Potboy to Moon Mountain, to see if you can rid the world of its darkness. Along the way, you meet and help creatures in towns, whose stories play out as their own fables with themes of darkness and light, that take fire at face value or metaphorically. Fire of destruction, fire for survival, fire of creativity.
The Midnight Walk. MoonHood / Fast Travel Games
Dark, twisted creatures inhabit the world and will murder you as soon as they spot you. You can’t fight against them, so most of the gameplay is about evading them through stealth, hiding from them, running from them, or distracting them with fire. None of it is very difficult once you learn the limits of your stealth against the monsters. There’s also some light puzzle solving, some of it timed; these usually involve lighting candles with oversized matches or asking Potboy to light fires or heat up boilers that power machines.
The Midnight Walk. MoonHood / Fast Travel Games
You can close your eyes in the game, which reveals hidden objects with sound. I had a bit of a hard time with this; thankfully, there’s an accessibility option that puts a dot on the screen when you use the ability. You quickly learn that you can also close your eyes to interact with objects with a glowing eye symbol, which extends to some enemies. This creates some of the best gameplay moments, and I wish there had been more of it and more iteration on it—the game generally doesn’t do enough to iterate on its systems. Despite this, the game’s brief 5-7 hour playtime ends before things can get stale.
The gameplay isn’t what makes The Midnight Walk such a compelling, unique experience. It’s the visuals, the atmosphere, and the mood. Everything in the game was modeled in clay, scanned, and then animated in a stop-motion style. You may notice shades of Tim Burton and Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, but there’s a far more sinister edge here. The world is scary; still, an undercurrent of sadness permeates everything, seeping out of the story into the game’s visuals. I took my time playing because I relished absorbing everything I saw, and the game still haunts me when I think about it. I played the game on a TV, but I imagine the experience would be overwhelming in VR, which the game fully supports. If I ever get a VR headset, this is a game I’ll replay.
The Midnight Walk. MoonHood / Fast Travel Games
On my Steam Deck, the game stayed at around 30-40 FPS with occasional dips on medium quality settings in its native resolution. It still looked great on my 4K TV with the Deck docked. With the game’s stop-motion inspired visuals, I was never bothered by the lower framerate.
I finished the game in a little over five hours, including replaying the final moments to see both endings. In that time, I completed half of the Steam achievements. Considering its length, some might find the game’s price point steep, but I feel that it is well worth it. The production value of The Midnight Walk is stellar.
The Midnight Walk is available now on Steam and PlayStation 5 (PSVR2 optional).
Overall Score: 9/10
Played on: Steam Deck
