Games You Might Have Missed: Midnight Scenes: The Highway
Midnight Scenes: The Highway is Octavi Navarro’s spooky point-and-click adventure game released September 26th, 2017.
Clare Barnes is an unassuming 29 year old, just trying to get where she’s going. Little does she know her night is about to go incredibly south. Upon getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, Clare needs to get to the nearby emergency telephone to call for help. To solve this conundrum, you have to guide Clare through the area, stumbling upon a grisly mystery in the process.
Midnight Scenes is a great example of compact storytelling done right. It feels like a darker, Stranger Things one-shot. The mood is set with spooky music reminiscent of The Twilight Zone (a show Navarro cited as a major influence) and black and white aesthetics. Without dialogue or text, the game manages to convey its tone and plot succinctly and effectively. Figuring out the environmental puzzles, and what’s going on in general, entirely depend on understanding your surroundings and getting context from photographs and diagrams you find.
The puzzles are great because they make sense. Midnight Scenes doesn’t fall back on old school adventure game sensibilities, instead making its puzzles fairly clear-cut, without being too obvious or easy. I also really enjoyed that the puzzles force you to encounter the story beats and show a bit of who Clare is. In the face of dark and terrible things, she’ll still do what it takes to get the hell out of there.
Midnight Scenes is available on itch.io and you can name your own price. If you like Navarro’s work, you can also support them on Patreon.
All images courtesy of Midnight Scenes: The Highway
