TheNightfall

From the moment I rented Poltergeist on VHS as a kid, I've always been a big fan of haunted house stories. This is the place where you're supposed to feel the safest, so to have it turn against you is the very definition of terrifying. The new game TheNightfall seems to understand that haunted houses are inherently scary. It knows that locking you in and cutting off all communication is a great setup to any scary story. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the extent of what it knows about horror. This is an astonishingly inept stab at the genre that is too preoccupied with creating frustratingly obtuse puzzles to generate any real horror. And do you want to know what the scariest thing is? TheNightfall currently retails for $40.

This is the story of Victoria Miller, who finds herself alone and afraid in a brand-new house. She and her husband just relocated to a new city because of work and her nerves are getting the best of her. It's while trying to cure her insomnia that she begins to suspect that something strange is going on. She discovers that she's locked inside, the phone lines have been cut, spooky dolls populate the rooms and every so often there's an ice cream truck that drives by. What does all this mean? It's up to Victoria to stay safe for eight hours in order to see the sun rise and survive the night.

TheNightfall is broken up into sixteen half-hour chunks, each of which have us solving puzzles to advance the story. What's tricky about this game is that it's never clear what you're supposed to be doing. This isn't one of those games where you're running from bad guys or picking up green herbs, because we're not really in any danger. In fact, a lot of the game involves digging through drawers and exploring the different rooms in hopes of triggering the event needed to move on to the next chapter.

That may sound like an exaggeration, but I assure you that it's not. A typical puzzle will have you investigating the kitchen, turning the water on and off in the bathroom, triggering a demonic doll in the bedroom, fixing the water again and then noticing a strange man in watching you from the middle of the street. If you can figure all that out, you'll find a note that fills in a bit of the story and tosses us into the next chapter.

If that all sounds kind of random, it's because it is. It's never clear what the game wants you to do from level to level, so most of your time is spent wandering into rooms and hoping to trigger an event. I hesitate to even call it a "puzzle," since it never feels like you're actually solving anything. What makes it even more frustrating is that some of the events happen at certain times, which means that you're stuck waiting around with nothing to do. Of course, you never really know when a time-sensitive event will pop up, so you could be searching the house for no reason at all. This is not just annoying, it's actually a colossal waste of time.

This is made so much worse when you see how small the house is. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot bigger (and nicer) than where I live in real life, but it feels microscopic compared to most games. Even most single-location horror games. And with the exception of a new doll popping up or chairs being moved around, there's rarely anything new to interact with. You're just cycling through the handful of rooms, opening up drawers, checking cabinets and biding your time until something happens. And that's not fun.

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It's also not scary. In fact, it's not until about halfway through the game that the developers work up enough nerve to make an attempt at a fright. I get the feeling that they assume that seeing a clown outside your window or an ice cream truck drive by will freak you out, but since you're never in any danger of being hurt, neither of these moments have an impact. It's not until they try scaring you inside the house that it becomes affective, and even that is more lame than spooky. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm not sure the developers of TheNightfall know what horror is.

Unfortunately, they also don't know how to optimize a game. I played through the game on the PlayStation 4, but you would never know it based on the footage. This is not what I would call a taxing game. You're stuck in a small location that is sparsely detailed and looks like a mid-tier PlayStation 2 game, and yet the game chugs along as if my console is about to blow up. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure I've seen a game with worse frame rate than this. Just turning around or walking up the stairs reduces the game to a crawl, and it happens every single time. And even if you can get past the single-digit frame rate, you'll be floored by the horrendous pop-ins. Chairs, tables, paintings, shelving, cabinets and everything else will literally disappear when you stand on the other side of the room. Who cares about a clown outside the window when all of the furniture disappears when you walk three feet away?

And then there's the asking price. TheNightfall is currently $30 on PlayStation 4 and $40 on Switch. I don't know why one is more expensive than the other, but I can tell you that both are grossly overpriced. There are games at a quarter of the cost that are not just more ambitious and inventive, but are actually fun to play. I'm not going to lie, the retail price is offensive, especially when you consider how simple and shallow this game is. You're stuck in a single location that never runs at a stable frame rate with obtuse puzzles that make absolutely no sense. There are a lot of bad games out there, but few have the guts to slap a $40 price on the box. Under no circumstance should you buy this game at full price. Or at all, for that matter.