5/3/2023 0 Comments Night bookIt’s also unfortunately rather low-energy and atmosphere-deficient, compounded by the shallow number of narrative divergences on offer. It underlines a game that largely feels like it was fashioned out of the available resources and rushed to market. The story conveniently keeps her father sequestered away in his own room as he combats mental illness (and worse), and it’s never even slightly convincing as anything more than a practical necessity of the production. The story takes place primarily in a few small sets with almost entirely locked off cameras, and presumably due to the pandemic, Loralyn and her father are never seen interacting on-screen together despite residing in the same apartment. The video quality is higher than is common for FMV games – even if very few people in the world actually have webcams that look this good – yet belies the generally thrown-together feel of the project otherwise. Though Night Book clearly has just a fraction of the budget afforded to either Late Shift or The Complex, it gives a handsome first impression. An in-game tracker also keeps count of the 15 endings and 223 scenes you’ve unlocked so far. The fun, in theory, is in going back and experimenting with different narrative permutations, which the game smartly encourages by allowing you to skip previously-watched scenes with the press of a button, ensuring you don’t need to slog through the 45-minute story again ad nauseum. It’s up to the player to try and figure out how to keep it at bay, or risk losing Loralyn’s soul to it.įans of prior Wales games will know the score right away you watch high-definition video footage unfold while periodically responding to typically one of two branching decisions, each offering up either distinct or mild variations to the ongoing story. Ultimately her fiancée’s work brings some unwanted supernatural attention Loralyn’s way, as she ends up tricked into reading from an ancient book which invites a malevolent presence into her home. She interprets video calls for clients, all while dealing with being pregnant, having a fiancée working on a lucrative land development deal far away, and caring for her mentally unwell father. However, choose-your-own-adventure thriller Night Book is another intriguing yet undercooked offering from the company, bearing the obvious scars of its constrained creation and feeling less like a fully-incubated idea than a hasty, low-effort cash-in on the subgenre they’ve helped revive interest in.Įvidently as a result of the remote production, the entire story takes place over webcams, as online interpreter Loralyn (Julie Dray) works a night shift from her flat. Publisher Wales Interactive, the outfit behind recent FMV games Late Shift and The Complex, is back with their latest effort, which was somewhat impressively produced entirely during lockdown amid the ongoing pandemic.
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