REVIEW : Night Call (PC)
Night Call is a cinematic experience game that is somewhere between the two. Set on the modern-day Paris, the central character is a taxi driver who gets engross into resolving a murder case gratitude to a dark secret from his past. As you drive throughout the city taking on fares your riders open up to you. You must collect clues and intel from your customers and colleagues to solve the conundrum in time.
Night Call owes a lot of its graphical style to film noir, featuring deeply divergent light and shadows and stark, fine lines. As you ride around the city, half your display has a map of Paris, and the other shows your taxi and the passengers you’re carrying. There are some pretty fabulous moments where the visuals cut away to a transient shop, displaying the rain beating down on the roads. These cutaways add to the spirit of film noir. At points, it can be difficult to remember that you’re playing a game. A lot of the time Night Call stretches across more like a film.
While Night Call supersedes in convening back to film noir in its visuals graphics, it is less victorious in recalling the nature of the genre. As you first ride around, listening to riders and pulling up clues, everything looks pretty severe and serious. Your character has a mysterious, hidden backstory, the city is dark and frequently disheartening and there’s a serial murderer on the loose. However, you do on moment pick up a rider or have a meeting which somewhat destroys the environment. Without actually plundering anything here’s a list of encounters which sort of removed any feeling of immersion. Santa Claus, a character from the future, the spirit of a victorian-era child, yourself, a cat. A curious side drive would presumably have been a better choice for some of these riders. The fights themselves aren’t bad, but they just break immersion like a rock to the face.
The play hurts from the identical ups and downs as the temper. You spend most of your time riding around and collecting up fares. As you go, you have to have an eye on your gradually waning time, money and fuel gauges. You have to adjust your time between learning clues, taking on riders, and going off to buy ammunition. Honestly, the fuel and business elements of the gameplay just feel excessive. Time control alone is a good sufficient way of adding stakes to the play. Having to manage money and fuel as well is just irritating and intrusive to genuine mechanics, such as rider communication.
Where Night Call gets into its own is in the times where you’re open to just ride around Paris talking to characters and studying about the environment and characters. It’s fun pulling your way through the maze of social communication among you and your fares, but it is less fun when you require to try and resolve the crime. On your initial time through each of the 3 involved cases, you have very little to go on. Each rider is just a picture on the map, and details of interest are just little interjection points. Unless you previously know who each customer is then pulling their little faces is random. Every so often the play will through a random sign at you from a random rider anyway. It’s completely possible that who you pick doesn’t matter at all.
Although Night Call seems like a play in which your choices are necessary. A corkboard filled with evidence is how you manage to solve the mystery each night. Defendants link directly to evidence on their own, so you don’t have enough input. On top of that, each evidence tumbles down to 1 sentence or word.
All in all, Night Call feels similar to a great game in concept which was let down by mediocre execution. There’s a pack of useless systems just sort of attached to the game which doesn’t require to be there. For instance, there’s extra time control mechanic to do with studying case files. The files you have to choose from are only about 4 or 5 in number, and you chose between reading them or sleeping. 6 in-game days is lots of time to study each file, with time to spare too.
The worst sin is apparently that it doesn’t matter what you kill your time doing. After the research, you have to accuse one of the defendants. If you blame someone other than the real murderer, the play asks if you’re sure. If you choose the right one, it doesn’t. You can kill the entire game twiddling your fingers and still resolve the crime. It’s a true shame that Night Call ends up being so disappointing. The player and search elements are a lot of fun, and great together. Finding out about your role backstory is fascinating. However, there’s just too much else operating on which lets the whole experience down. None of the 3 cases proposes anything that different since they all highlight mostly the same characters. Even discovering your role results in the same outcome.
REVIEW : Whispers of a Machine (PC)
