The Midnight Walk Review - A Captivating Nightmare Carved Out Of Clay

The Midnight Walk is an oddity by design. First announced during a PlayStation State of Play last September, it immediately stunned with its evocative, claymation-inspired design. As the debut game of Swedish studio MoonHood, it has much of the talent behind games like Lost in Random and Ghost Giant on its team. It clearly builds on the legacy of these games, creating something visually striking, yet also emotionally poignant. It's also playable in VR or on a standard screen, both on PC and PS5.

The Midnight Walk was marketed as a " cozy horror game ," blending two seemingly incongruous genres to create something that defies characterization. In that regard, it succeeds: it deftly combines the comfortable cuteness of the former genre with the uncanny unfamiliarity of the latter, charming and terrifying the player in equal measure. But it suffers from its own inconsistency, with a lack of challenge and a weaker story in its second half.

A Touching, Resonant Story

Putting The Pieces Together

In The Midnight Walk , you play an unnamed, largely unidentified entity known only as The Burnt One. You immediately team up with a sort of sentient clay torch, who comes to be known as the Potboy, and are given a mission: you must complete the titular Midnight Walk through a land shrouded eternally in night , eventually ascending Moon Mountain and reigniting the sun to restore daylight to the forsaken world around you.

But this is just my post-factum summary: there's no exposition dumping, no expert explanations to bog you down in lore. In practice, you're thrown down in the middle of a strange, unfamiliar world, and forced to put the narrative together yourself by collecting disparate fragments of the story, scattered all over the world. Most NPCs know as much as you do when it comes to why the sun went out; they're mainly concerned with their struggles, how the sun's sudden disappearance has affected them individually, and how you can help them.

It's effectively the Dark Souls approach to storytelling, and it works exceptionally well here . Each challenge you solve, each collectible you discover, reveals a new piece of the puzzle, and it's entirely up to you to put them all together in the end.

"The Tale Of The Burnt One"

The story is told episodically, divided into six chapters, each titled " The Tale of " something-or-other. And each one explores a particular leg of the Midnight Walk, delving deeper into a particular character's background, or a particular location's strange and tragic fate. It certainly keeps the plot moving and the gameplay interesting , at least in the early chapters: every new area introduces new faces, locations, and wrinkles for puzzle-solving.

Each chapter plays out like a fairy tale , beginning with a simple, understandable conundrum in a far-off place, and ending with a moral lesson plainly told. Certain story beats and images are perfectly calculated for emotional devastation: piecing together the grim history of the Molgrims in the second chapter put a pit in my stomach, and discovering the thief's true identity in the third chapter brought a tear to my eye. Still, the narrative is frequently, defiantly hopeful and uplifting, which is one of its great strengths.

The Midnight Walk is a relatively short game; it took me just over seven hours to beat its six chapters, and would likely take up to ten hours when getting all the collectibles.

But, as is the nature of episodic storytelling, some episodes are always bound to be weaker than others . The fourth and fifth chapters of The Midnight Walk go just a little too deep into the origins of the clay world and the reasons behind its existence, and that killed just a little too much of the mystique for me. The rest of the story is kept at arm's length, which is when it works best.

The Midnight Walk's Clay-Hewn Visuals Consistently Amaze

I Made It Out Of Clay

A lot of games have attempted to emulate the claymation aesthetic. Some, including the recent South of Midnight , have done exceptionally well at it. But few of them are as visually striking as The Midnight Walk . It clearly takes a page from Henry Selick's book - many of the character designs are obviously inspired by The Nightmare Before Christmas , but they're wholly original in their conception and their roles within the story.

That's because these character models were hand-crafted out of actual, physical clay by the team at MoonHood , and their work shows. Everything has that rough, asymmetrical, hand-crafted feel, and moves with the jerky motions and stuttering uncertainty of stop-motion animation.

It's more than an aesthetic decision, too. The use of stop-motion-style animation makes the world of The Midnight Walk that much stranger and uncannier , sending both its horror beats and its sweeter moments home. Monsters are scarier when they move in an unnatural way, and endearing little clay creatures are cuter when you can see the little hand-sculpted imperfections in them.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention its music and voice acting , which is clearly done with a passion that drives the story forward and endears you to the characters even more. To accentuate its handcrafted beauty, The Midnight Walk employs a folk-inspired soundtrack, with music for guitar, violin, piano, and banjo—simple but incredibly effective.

The Midnight Walk's Gameplay Falters In Its Second Half

Light My Fire

At its core, The Midnight Walk is essentially a puzzle game . Most of these puzzles revolve around rekindling fires: lighting half-melted candles to find your way, or shooting flaming matches into the distance to distract fire-hungry enemies. Besides that, closing your eyes is an important mechanic, with certain puzzles requiring you to use sound clues alone to track down hidden items, or to blink to make a monster or a barrier disappear.

The puzzles are all pretty simple; it's certainly no Blue Prince in terms of complexity. I was rarely challenged, and never totally stumped. That's not such a bad thing, but I found myself craving higher difficulty in certain places . This is only exacerbated by excessive hand-holding, as, a short distance away from almost every puzzle, you can find its near-complete solution spelled out for you in plain text or illustrative diagrams.

In the first half or so of The Midnight Walk , each successive chapter introduces new puzzle mechanics, or iterates on the existing ones with new complications or special conditions. This keeps the game interesting, and ensures there's always something new to learn, even when the puzzles aren't particularly challenging. However, the puzzles in the second half of the game don't live up to the expectations set in the first . Many are repetitive - there's an overabundance of chase sequences, and the puzzles in the last two chapters especially are overly easy.

Close Your Eyes

The Midnight Walk is playable in both regular and VR modes; I split my time with the game between the two. Unsurprisingly, playing in VR does dispel some of my qualms with the gameplay . Even walking simulators play better in VR because they're more immersive, and The Midnight Walk was no exception. I took more time to enjoy the sculpted vistas or look for tiny details throughout the world. Striking matches against boxes felt incredibly tactile, as did throwing objects across the map when I was finished with them.

I even enjoyed some of the chase sequences in VR , particularly the ones that require you to hide in burrows. These filled me with a kind of childlike glee, as if I were playing a game of hide-and-seek in a nightmarish playground.

Unfortunately, The Midnight Walk can be very disorienting in VR . If you have any predisposition to motion sickness, this is not the one for you. In cutscenes, the camera often pans across scenes or is raised into the air, which almost invariably made me dizzy. The Midnight Walk also only has one locomotion method, continuous walking, which can cause motion sickness.

The Midnight Walk Is An Eccentric Game

The Midnight Walk Presents Some Interesting Ideas

The Midnight Walk is really nice to look at. It pulls off the claymation aesthetic perfectly, and its world is imaginative and original down to the last detail . Its story is largely excellent, with captivating characters and emotional heft around every single turn. It's one of the most original horror games I've ever experienced, and one of the strangest worlds I've ever had the privilege of exploring.

Unfortunately, the experience of playing The Midnight Walk leaves a little to be desired. It draws you in with its fascinating early chapters, but it can't quite keep up the same level of puzzling intrigue throughout the rest of the game. And unless you're a seasoned VR pro, you're bound to experience a little discomfort while playing. Still, if you're at all curious about the dreamlike world it allows you to inhabit, The Midnight Walk is worth playing on the strength of its story, visuals, and music alone.

Screen Rant was provided with a digital Steam code for the purpose of this review.

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