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indigozealI've been quiet lately, because I've been trying to sort out how I feel about NightCry to write a review. I've gotten myself so mixed up on the title that I have no idea what to say. Nothing's obliging me to write a review, of course, but I feel the need to put a capper on the experience. I need closure.
In brief: the game's all right in its first two chapters, providing decent classic Clock Tower action in the first and mixing it up a bit gameplaywise and hinting at deeper plot developments in the second, but it smacks itself up in the third, the last and by far the largest section. This is thanks in no small part to one moment that's just toxically bad in a Bionic Commando remake sense - it's so wrong that renders everything that comes after it invalid & moot, because the game is already definitively wrecked. To set this up for the curious:heroine Rooney has just climbed through a ventilation system in an attempt to find her way to a new section of her besieged cruise ship and possibly locate her missing father figure, bespectacled professor and Chapter 2 protagonist Leonard. Her trip winds her up in an infirmary, whereupon she peeks behind one of the curtains, and, well, this happens.
And that's representative of too much of the rest of the game's approach to its horror, albeit not on such a forehead-slappingly boneheaded scale: it's goofy - in a tone-deaf way, not in a vending machine self-aware way - when it's trying to be scary. NightCry actually builds a gallery of the showpiece "horrors" you encounter throughout gameplay, and one of them - I am not making this up - is "a bathroom hand dryer turns on unexpectedly." (Nothing else happens - the dryer doesn't eat you or anything. The dryer just turns on, and that's it.)
There's a heck of a lot else to talk about, such as illogical event triggers and janky 3D controls and the cast's totally bizarre approach to the depression suffered by one of the characters, which they find more shockingly incomprehensible, offensive, and worthy of single-minded fixation than the current outbreak of dismemberment aboard the ship. But the comprehensive airing of the grievances must be saved for a longer post. As it is, my gut wants to peg NightCry below even Shattered Memories, but my head protests that that can't be right, not when the game is at least decent in so many ways that are true to the classic franchise. But then I look at that linked video. And my mind reels.
.
In brief: the game's all right in its first two chapters, providing decent classic Clock Tower action in the first and mixing it up a bit gameplaywise and hinting at deeper plot developments in the second, but it smacks itself up in the third, the last and by far the largest section. This is thanks in no small part to one moment that's just toxically bad in a Bionic Commando remake sense - it's so wrong that renders everything that comes after it invalid & moot, because the game is already definitively wrecked. To set this up for the curious:
And that's representative of too much of the rest of the game's approach to its horror, albeit not on such a forehead-slappingly boneheaded scale: it's goofy - in a tone-deaf way, not in a vending machine self-aware way - when it's trying to be scary. NightCry actually builds a gallery of the showpiece "horrors" you encounter throughout gameplay, and one of them - I am not making this up - is "a bathroom hand dryer turns on unexpectedly." (Nothing else happens - the dryer doesn't eat you or anything. The dryer just turns on, and that's it.)
There's a heck of a lot else to talk about, such as illogical event triggers and janky 3D controls and the cast's totally bizarre approach to the depression suffered by one of the characters, which they find more shockingly incomprehensible, offensive, and worthy of single-minded fixation than the current outbreak of dismemberment aboard the ship. But the comprehensive airing of the grievances must be saved for a longer post. As it is, my gut wants to peg NightCry below even Shattered Memories, but my head protests that that can't be right, not when the game is at least decent in so many ways that are true to the classic franchise. But then I look at that linked video. And my mind reels.
.
