Nocturnal Visitors Logo
Nocturnal Visitors Icon
Nocturnal Visitors

Developer: Miguel H. Death

Publisher: Ratalaika Games

Adventure
Budget
Puzzle
  • Price: $4.99
  • Release Date: Jun 28, 2024
  • Number of Players: 1
  • Last on Sale: -
  • Lowest Historic Price: -
  • ESRB Rating: T [Teen]
Videos
Reviews:
  • Watch this review on YouTube
    While it absolutely delivers a different sort of narrative and experience, it’s bare bones nature is an obstacle

    One of the challenges I have when reviewing indie games, is that though I appreciate the lengths singular developers or small teams must go to in order to complete a title, at the end of the day it’s all about helping people looking for their next title getting the most bang for their buck. Certainly in the indie space there’s more to what is “good” as the story themes, general vibe, and unique qualities can still carry titles with execution that’s inconsistent. That said, releases aren’t made in a vacuum and the Switch library is thousands strong, so you’re ultimately competing with everything else that has come before you.

    That puts me in a tough spot with Nocturnal Visitors, a title that when you read its press copy seems to be promising quite a bit, but struggles to give you a taste of anything compelling for quite a while. Yes, you’ll eventually take control of a variety of characters with different personalities and points of view, which I suppose is novel, but the underlying story still didn’t grab me so that’s a bit of a wash. It promises being able to investigate gory crime scenes, but really, with it running in an old-school RPG engine there’s only so much detail that can be managed, so that’s also underwhelming.

    Though I don’t know if I’d fault the game using the RPG Maker engine as a tool to simplify development, in particular I think the adventure elements attempted in the game suffer from this. Even by classic point-and-click adventure standards, searching for items and information can feel primitive and the construction of the puzzles doesn’t always work very well. Kudos to the developer for experimenting to try to implement a variety of ideas, but with the varying success of the results it can also be a tough game to love. I understand that this is apparently the planned first chapter of a few, and if that’s the case it would be good to focus on helping the gameplay elements work better to not make the experience of the story stumble quite so much.


    Justin Nation, Score:
    Bad [5.8]
2024

Nindie Spotlight

. All rights reserved