SENSEs: Midnight

The new horror game SENSEs: Midnight is set in the far-off future, when people will live-stream themselves doing incredibly stupid things for likes and comments. I hate to break it to second-time developer Suzaku Games, but we’re already living in that dystopia. Forget ghosts, what’s truly scary is that we currently live in a world addicted to attention and in constant need of validation. So, to get in the spirit of this game, I recommend you click the like button and leave a comment on my review of SENSEs: Midnight.

Let me introduce you to Kaho, a young girl (and occult researcher) who is live-streaming her visit to the long-abandoned Ikebukuro Walking Park. The legends say that if you come at night, the “Midnight Door” will open and the victims’ corrupted spirits will escape and look for vengeance. This is too much to resist for the local ghost hunter, who turns on her camera with the hopes of giving her audience a real show, all while wearing the skimpiest dress possible, because some things never change.

Because she’s live-streaming her adventure in a ghost-filled park, a lot of the story and dialog is conveyed through the chat window. As Kaho uncovers clues, discovers new locations and runs into scary things, the chat will chime in with their own thoughts and reactions. A lot of this is playful and occasionally funny, but there’s a real sense of dread that sets in as we begin to realize the deadly situation the live-streamer has found herself in. Thankfully, there’s a person in chat that seems to know what’s going on and how to survive the night, but should we trust him? Do we even have a choice?

The entire game takes place in a small walking park that has been completely walled off from the rest of the city. While it’s not obvious at first, the goal is to walk around the park and pick up items that you’ll later use to solve puzzles and simple tasks. This becomes tricky when you realize that Kaho can only hold four items at the same time, which means that she’ll need to constantly drop items and manage the very limited inventory.

This is, of course, one of the pillars of the survival horror experience, and SENSEs: Midnight is definitely a survival horror game. If it wasn’t for the modern visuals, you would think that this was a long-forgotten game from the 1990s. It even employs the tank controls made famous by Resident Evil and Silent Hill. This is the type of game that drops you into a haunted location without any weapons or ammo, forcing our hero to use her wits to solve puzzles and outrun a lot of scary ghosts.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

While the park may not be very big, it’s full of supernatural surprises. On top of picking up items and solving puzzles, Kaho will use her camera to investigate the area for hidden clues. Sometimes that’s just symbols that her chat will try to decipher, while other times she’ll catch ghosts hiding in the dark recesses of the forest. There are a lot of genuinely spooky moments tucked away inside this game, though a lot of it you’ll have to track down. This helps to extend what is otherwise a short and straight-forward adventure.

For as much as I cringe while watching IRL streamers, I have to admit that this is a pretty great setup for a horror game. I like the idea of the chat constantly adding commentary to the game and not always being on the side of Kaho. If anything, I wish the game would have leaned more into that aspect of the game. The chat only comes up when they have something important to say, which allows you to separate the game from the chat. I would have preferred they kept the chat box up at all times, reacting to, well, everything. Would a lot of it be Pepe frogs and dumb emojis? Sure, but at least that would be authentic to the live-stream experience. It would help to sell the idea that she has an audience, something I found myself forgetting about in the second half of the game.

Unfortunately, this is only one of the issues I have with this game’s execution. I’m also not a huge fan of the puzzles, which are obtuse and often come across as little more than busywork. This is especially true with the coin collecting, which ends up being a lot more important (and frustrating) than you initially expect. The fact that you can only hold four items at once is also annoying, even if it is a genre cliché. There’s no reason why this needs to be the case, especially since she comes to the park with a backpack ready to be filled. It forces you to strategically discard items, which in turn creates a whole lot of backtracking.

It also doesn’t help that the park is incredibly small and tends to look the same. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of being dropped in a haunted mansion or some sort of isolated location, but at least Resident Evil knew that it had to shake things up from time to time with an underground laboratory or a creepy hedge maze. It only takes a few minutes to run from one side of the park to the other, so you’re constantly seeing the same spots and landmarks.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

And did I mention that the ghosts and spirits are terrible villains? Well, they are. There are only a couple different types, both of which are extremely easy to avoid. The game wants you to use these special hiding spots to avoid the supernatural creatures roaming the park, but you can side-step these ghouls and ghosts without breaking a sweat. And in the off-chance that you do get cornered by a spirit, there are special items you can pick up that will destroy the ghost on contact. You’ll still probably die a few times, but compared to most old school survival horror games, SENSEs: Midnight is, well, a walk in the park.

I will admit, there’s a certain charm to this game that made me want to like it. I dig the setup and found the haunted park to be genuinely unnerving. I even liked the live-stream conceit, even though I found Kaho to be unbearable. The problem is that for everything that I liked about SENSEs: Midnight, there was something that left me cold. It’s the kind of middle-of-the-road horror game that is not good enough to recommend and not bad enough to be memorable. Worst of all, it’s a missed opportunity to say something about our attention-obsessed culture and the types of people that would go to a haunted park for the views. This could have been so much better.