Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ Slow Burn Keeps the Lights on All the Way Through

Dear Ty,

In my opinion, the greatest strength of Marvel Comics is not the fact that the stories take place outside our window, but rather that there’s always another story waiting to be told. That’s how I feel just a few hours removed from finishing my 65-ish hour playthrough of Firaxis’ long-awaited Marvel’s Midnight Suns. So many things about this game stick out, but most surprising to me is that it took five years to come out; this means it was being made alongside the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Avengers, and Guardians of the Galaxy games, and yet it’s the XCOM devs who make the game with the most compelling narrative to me.

Remember that super awkward E3 video for Marvel’s Avengers where they had the actors in the game talk about how this was going to be a different story from the movies? Midnight Suns is a game that doesn’t need to worry about other media; it mixes nearly everything together in a Marvel-sized gumbo pot and feeds it all to you like an insistent grandmother. If YOU remember it, the game most likely does as well. But that’s the beauty of this approach: there’s so much writing and so many asides that you can just let everything wash over you as Steve Rogers or Peter Parker spoon feed you every detail you’ve heard repeated for two decades, mashing through those conversations as you listen intently to Blade and Nico Minoru and absorb every new detail you can.

One of the most interesting choices Midnight Suns made was to cast Yuri Lowenthal as Spider-Man. He also voiced Spider-Man for Sony in 2018. While this game is in a different universe, it is very on-brand for Marvel to use this connection just in case they want to pull in story elements from the other game eventually. This type of connection helps Spider-Man feel familiar, in the same way that he’s supposed to feel familiar because he’s the de facto Marvel mascot. It’s a choice that may be nothing more than a contractual thing from Marvel, but it feels like a decision made with love for the performance.

Midnight Suns insists on being a AAA videogame in every possible way. And that also means that sometimes it wants you to explore every possible hidden area. These puzzles are thankfully entirely optional, and I didn’t bother to get any extra exploration powers in my first playthrough. That wasn’t because I didn’t want to explore, but rather because I wanted to spend my time leveling up cards and talking to characters. The relationship system in Midnight Suns is simple and straightforward, and while I’m left rather frustrated that the game chose to give in to a system where giving characters gifts ends up being more important than the words you use, most of the gifts did get a chuckle out of me and even gives fans a literal starting point in the comics, but including the first comic book the character appeared in.

But the thing that took Midnight Suns from a game that I, the dork who maxed out five characters in Marvel’s Avengers, would like to a game that I need this entire industry to internalize is the way it treats its pacing. In other Firaxis games, the primary tension comes from the enemy, in XCOM, you’re constantly on the backfoot and always aware that you’re running short on time. In Civilization, you’re always trying to stay ahead of other leaders, maximize research and production, and keep barbarians at bay. 

In Midnight Suns, the only person you have to play against is yourself. Yes, you do have to advance the story, but you get to decide when. If you really want to get Midnight Suns over with, you can, but I haven’t spent this much time playing a game that didn’t have the ticking clock of a battle pass since Hades, and honestly, this may just become a Tetris-like experience for me, where I play not to be better, not to get the extra costume, but just because I love watching Hulk Smash. At no point does the game tell you you have to finish it, and when 2022 felt like a year where service games dominated my life, it feels nice that Marvel’s Midnight Suns is both a boxed game that has an end and also a game I could just keep playing forever.

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