The Midnight Walk taught me that it's okay to embrace the darkness
So perhaps it was fate that I sat down to play The Midnight Walk this past weekend on a whim. After two exhausting weeks of travel that fully drained my energy, I decided to settle in for developer MoonHood's debut game. I didn't know much about it other than the fact that it's an adventure game that features a Claymation art style that's a dead ringer for Tim Burton's work. Though it can be played on a normal display, I chose to try it on PlayStation VR2 instead. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just wanted to disappear for four hours — a textbook case of escapism.
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Thankfully, The Midnight Walk didn't let me drift away. Instead of escaping my troubles in a fantastical world, I got the wisdom I needed from a moving fable that's about both reigniting your inner fire and knowing when it's okay to embrace the darkness. Like any great fantasy, it only whisks us away to bring us back to where we started with fresh eyes.
Fire in my heart
Created by a new studio founded by developers who worked on Lost in Random, The Midnight Walk is a playable fable built out of clay. In it, I control a character known only as The Burnt One who sets out on a quest to bring light to a dark world. I am accompanied by a critter named Potboy, a sentient lantern whose flame is exactly what I need to navigate fire-based puzzles that have me lighting candles and heating up cauldrons to raise platforms. It's a straightforward adventure game that's entirely built around light puzzles instead of combat.
Its most immediately striking quality is its stop-motion art. Like this year's South of Midnight, it does a convincing job of adapting physical animation to an interactive medium, complete with characters that are animated on twos. At first, I see an obvious parallel to Tim Burton, but The Midnight Walk has its roots in deeper animation traditions. I'd liken it more to classic European and Soviet films, sharing more in common with Yuri Norstein's Hedgehog in the Fog than The Nightmare Before Christmas. It strikes a delicate tonal balance that's somewhere between cute and creepy. It's childlike, as if pulled out of a storybook, but mature and emotional in the same breath.
It's sort of a Rorschach test for players as there are a few ways you could categorize it depending on how its tone hits you. At times, it's a warm and charming adventure. Other times, it's nearly a horror game in the vein of Little Nightmares. That duality isn't a flaw, but rather a function. The Midnight Walk is very much about the tension present in its tone.
The story takes place across five chapters, each of which is centered around fire as a multi-purpose symbol. In some tales, fire is a fundamental resource needed for survival. I need to bring fire back to a freezing town to keep it warm, for instance. Other tales abstract it a bit more. One chapter tells the story of a craftsman and his strained relationship with his daughter, a conflict that snuffs out his creative passion. Much of the gameplay has me resolving those issues by wielding the power of fire to solve villagers problems as I embark on a trek up the fabled Midnight Walk to restore a burnt out sun.
MoonHood gets creative about how to turn its symbol into gameplay. I occasionally need to grab giant matches and strike them against a box to light torches. I can command Potboy to move around and light objects up with the press of a button, making for some clever 'one-player co-op' puzzles. One repeated sequence has the two of us running through a raging storm, stopping to hide behind rocks before a big gust of wind freezes us. In those moments, I need to huddle around his burning head to stay warm. Fire isn't just an element here, but a lifeline. It's no wonder that the residents of this world feel so lost without it; they are left wandering through the darkness.
You might be tempted to boil story down to a battle of light vs. dark, a dull crutch of a theme that so many games lean on. The Midnight Walk is far more nuanced about that though, which is where its excellent VR mode comes into play. Darkness can be terrifying for The Burnt One. It hides monsters that stalk the hero, forcing me to occasionally tiptoe through stealth sequences lest I have the bejeezus scared out of me. But like fire, darkness can be a tool too. When I close my eyes (literally on PSVR2 thanks to excellent eye tracking), I develop a superpower. I can hear hidden objects like keys, allowing me to find them by tracking the sound. When I see a blue eye icon, I can close my eyes to reveal secret paths. Some enemies have that same eye and I can vanquish them by standing tall and shutting my eyes rather than turning and running away. I'm scared the first time I do that, as I can hear the sound of a charging beast approaching. But when I open my eyes, it has disintegrated.
The nuance to The Midnight Walk's story is in how it sees darkness as a necessity like water. Rather than being something to escape, it's framed as a constructive force that allows us to recover when times get tough. There is room for self reflection in the seemingly infinite blackness. Stretch out as far as your body will allow to fill that void and then strike a match when you're ready to continue the long walk.
That idea resonated with me by the end of the four-hour journey. The more I played, the less I dreaded the dark. The horror elements dissipated as I grew more confident. I could close my eyes without fear, beating the monsters on their home turf. I was still on a quest to rekindle a lost flame, but I found that I could navigate the twisted clay world even without it. We are not lost even when the lights go out. There's always a path forward. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and listen.
The Midnight Walk is available now on PS5, PC, and compatible VR headsets.
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