SENSEs: Midnight wants to be an old-school, PS2-style survival horror game, and it achieves just that in many ways. However, its steadfast refusal to update tired and dated mechanics for modern audiences turns the game into what is ultimately an incredibly frustrating experience.
You play as Uesugi Kaho, an adventurous college student and occult researcher, who on returning to Japan decides to investigate an infamous urban legend with her buddies. The Midnight Door, located within the abandoned Ikebukuro Walking Park, is supposedly home to the paranormal if opened at midnight. After entering the park, the entrance becomes blocked, and you are separated from your friends – but it’s ok, you have a futuristic WhatsApp group to stay in contact with.
You will quickly find the door, and being somewhat sensible will also try and find an exit before you try and open the door. But when the exit is also blocked, that sensibility goes out of the window and you open the door anyway. Turns out, this wasn’t the cleverest of moves.
Once the story part of the game is out of the way, the rest of the game involves running away from the main baddie using zig-zag movements and solving a few puzzles by finding and combining objects by way of your very small backpack. You can also find collectables to photograph with your camera. This is pretty much how you’ll spend the remaining 2-3 hours, which is mostly due to the amount of backtracking.
The initial presentation is good, the music fits, the Japanese speech is performed well, and the translations are very readable. However the graphics are basic and way too dark in most places, the walking animations are very slidey, and of course, the protagonist does have an inappropriate Japanese jiggle. Cameras are fixed and placed in very strange positions, and your movement is done by tank controls, so most of your time will be fighting these.
The park itself isn’t that big, but the location is so difficult to navigate it may as well be a huge maze. If you don’t have the budget for the cinematics, you really do need a fully controllable camera. Movement is at a snail’s pace unless you hold the run button to skip along a little faster – and get ready, as you will hold the run button for the entirety of the game. Why wouldn’t run be the default, where you hold a button to walk instead?
There’s no combat here, you just have to run away. Only the main baddie gives you any real danger here, as you wrestle the controls and try and zig-zag to shake them. Get caught, and it’s an instant game-over. At which point you realise there’s a manual game-save system in the menu that I really should have used. If only the tutorial would have told me! Not fun.
I hadn’t played the first game in the series – Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story – but by all accounts, it was a respectable 2D affair. However with the exception of a few neon lights, cyberpunk is mostly missing from the sequel, and the switch to 3D really hasn’t been successful. Fatally for any survival-horror game, it just isn’t scary.
SENSEs: Midnight is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and Nintendo Switch priced at £11.99 // $14.99 // €14.99.
