Welcome home.
Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re talking about Midnight Manor, a late entry suggestion for Pocket this Halloween that ended up probably saving our schedule. Midnight Manor is a short horror-themed platformer from a solo developer that encourages players to play the game multiple times in different ways to see all the narrative possibilities it has to offer. Mechanically speaking, the game is simple, revolving around carrying items necessary for progression from place to place and navigating the titular manor. This simple gameplay lends itself, in a way, to the multiple ending-based design of the game, encouraging you to make small optimizations to make each successive run a bit faster, but admittedly does very little to make the game more engaging to go through each time. With no enemies, and therefore no fail state, to speak of, what is left to really engage with lies in its atmosphere, music, art and narrative content. All of these things are subjective, but given the short time investment to actually complete the game, and even seeing all the endings isn’t going to add all that much to your total playtime, it is likely worth the low barrier to entry to playing. We’re going to be talking about how character design can raise questions and eyebrows and our thoughts on the intentionality of it, what vibes the presentational aspects of the game put off, and we theorize on what this game may be a sequel to.
Thank you for joining us again this week! Midnight Manor was a strangely nostalgic experience that harked back to indie games during our more experimental years when we were just trying anything we could find. That said, it’s a mixed bag, though still more polished and with more thought than you might expect from a project that was this tiny. Did Midnight Manor send you back to a simpler time? Did it get you to play through it more than once? Let us know in the comments, or over in the Discord, where the suggestion for this game came from. As I said at the beginning, our time was rather tight this month, and our last Halloween game is going to bleed over into November a little bit, but we’re always happy to try weird things for October and this certainly qualifies. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Anodyne for a bit more of an adventure-y feel for November, so be sure to check back with us then!