From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Bible, dirt, dust, and clay have frequently been portrayed as a fundamental building block of life. In Greek creation myths, the Titan Prometheus made humankind out of earth, sculpting us from water and mud before eventually gifting humanity technology in the form of fire. It’s a connection not lost on The Midnight Walk, a first-person horror-adventure game about the power of flame that’s quite literally made from clay: virtually every character and background prop was sculpted with clay before being digitally scanned into Unreal Engine 5.
Simply put, the results are stunning, a gothic, creepy-cute world populated by frightening creatures and adorable freaks like the game’s mascot, Potboy, whose crooked smile marks a visual style leaning into asymmetry and intentional imperfections. It’s a look that builds on the sometimes charming, often disquieting characters found in stop-motion films like Studio Laika’s Coraline or Tim Burton’s TheNightmare Before Christmas, while also channeling age-old myths and folklore as it sets you on a hero’s journey to bring fire back to the world. Along the way, you’ll make plenty of pit stops as you have Potboy help you solve puzzles, explore each locale, and run or hide from some genuinely unsettling critters. The main appeal is definitely the one-of-a-kind visual approach, but this isn’t just a digital art gallery.
The story begins with only a sentence of exposition as the Burnt One (the player character) stumbles out of their sarcophagus following “the end of the world.” While we eventually get hints about what’s going on and what this apocalypse entails, the setting is never overexplained, allowing it to maintain a well-considered sense of awe; it leaves space to speculate like you’re picking up bits and pieces from a partially remembered oral story.
And that sense of mystery and wonder only deepens as you take your first steps outside your former tomb and witness the view: an ominous blue-gray valley dotted with strange architecture, crooked trees, and what appears to be a massive, immobile head. Even if you’re not familiar with the deeply unusual way this setting was created, with real-world sculptors crafting most of this scenery, it will likely be obvious that there’s something different at work here, an unusual amount of tactile detail in every crooked ridge and off-kilter edge. These creations bend and squiggle like the wobbly outline of an expressionist painting, but these uncanny views don’t lessen the sense that you’ve been placed in a diorama alongside miniature horrors. Simply put, it never gets old to witness every particular of the backdrops, where real-world objects are repurposed into forlorn scenery, always maintaining the sense that the artist who forged this universe has long since abandoned their creation.
Before long, we find the weird little gremlin creature on the box art, a pot that sprouts legs and runs off until we feed him some coal to munch on. A few cryptic conversations with a bard and a two-headed soothsayer later, you and your new buddy Potboy are off on the Midnight Walk, which is both a literal road leading to Moon Mountain and also seems to be some sort of ritual involving fire and sacrifice.
But of course, this wouldn’t be much of a journey if this road were a straight one, and the Midnight Walk seems to have a mind of its own, diverting you towards troubled places that need a nudge in the right direction. You’ll visit frozen villages and cursed bogs, each locale tying into the game’s ancient influences by presenting these detours like one-off fables. While these stories are largely disconnected, they’re united in how they throw you into a place in media res, starting with a misleading introduction before having you piece together the whole truth.
There is a great mixture of tragedy and stagnation, as each place is thoroughly stuck in an unpleasant past. We witness the weight of parents passing their ambitions onto their children, mob violence, and unresolved colonial histories, with each tale finding a fairly nuanced resolution, even if it only ever feels like we’re just passing through each of these places instead of building strong bonds with those who live there. They’re a bit like old-school fairytales, except without the thinly-veiled intent of scaring children into obeying their parents.
And then there’s the overarching story as the Burnt One and Potboy continue on their trek, bringing back fire to a place that’s been asleep in darkness for a very long time.. As a seeming antagonist emerges, a pair of eyes in inky shadow called the Dark Itself, the story reaches similarly complicated feelings about classic darkness and light imagery and the duality of fire. While the somewhat distancing vagueness of the story and the fact that you play as a blank-slate style protagonist make it hard to connect with the narrative on a more personal level, the scope of the story and its grand imagery make up for this. It also helps that you’re probably likely to form at least a bit of a connection with your little companion, who makes very cute, unintelligible noises before looking back at you for praise after doing a good deed. Overall, it taps into the vibe of traditional folk stories and mythology while doing more than just repeating old creation myths, conjuring their scope but also wrestling with age-old ideas.
As for the interactive elements that have you working through these side-areas while solving puzzles and avoiding monsters, this is definitely the weakest link of the experience, even if these parts are never outright awful. As for when using your head to progress, you’ll frequently have to command Potboy as you light candles and step on pressure-sensitive plates to open a door or activate a contraption. The main issue with these sequences is that they’re generally very simple and rarely require more than a second or two of consideration, feeling more like a bit of busywork than anything more engaging.
The more interesting part of the gameplay is the stealth-horror, where you hide in inexplicably placed closets and find cover to avoid monsters that swallow you in a single go. You can light a fire to distract the writhing Crawlers or hide in houses to dodge the lightning-quick Grinners. While even here the aesthetics are the main highlight, thanks to creature designs straight out of a child’s nightmares, there’s some smart level design that almost guarantees you’ll get found and chased right near an exit, leading to many anxious sprints towards safety. And while much of the game is quite linear, the best stealth-horror segments are the ones that combine exploration and scares, like a stroll through a Grinner-infested neighborhood that forces you to get close to the danger. However, even with these occasional change-ups, the sneaking segments eventually wear thin due to a lack of depth and variety.
Another mechanic that has some interesting aspects but doesn’t fully come together is the focus on sensory details. Sometimes, you have to close your eyes to focus your hearing, letting you find hidden keys by following sound cues. At other moments, you’ll have to snap your lids shut to open a path or freeze an incoming monster in its place—the latter is probably the best use of this mechanic. However, while these aspects don’t significantly detract from the experience, just like the puzzles and stealth segments, they don’t really enhance things either due to their simplicity.
When it comes to player control, The Midnight Walk is at its best when it gives us time to luxuriate in its vistas, like whenever it lets us roam these places a bit more freely than usual, giving time to appreciate these backdrops while searching for whatever keys or other arcane objects are needed to proceed. While each area you visit is defined by the same macabre atmosphere, they have their own visual identities, like an inexplicable ship graveyard or a green-hued hollow city. While traversing these places, Joel Bille’s moody score swoons in with melancholy, jazzy riffs that match and often set the tone as we cycle between dark wonder and faint sparks of hope; this is very much a full audiovisual package where the soundtrack is just as important in establishing the mood as anything else. Recorded by a local Gothenburg band, Bortre Rymden, these tracks perfectly match the game’s handcrafted qualities.
Although The Midnight Walk’s interactive elements can’t match the artistry of its hand-molded clay figures, that doesn’t dampen how impressive this audiovisual journey is at its best. Its aesthetics are tied together by a consistently arresting dark fairytale look that manages to get at more than just one feeling at a time—creepy and cute, cozy and unsettling, silly and scary. The story wrestles with similar contrasts, prodding at the structure of many creation myths to find dual meanings in age-old symbols. And did I mention Potboy is both very cute and very ugly and is the best little guy? Incredible visual presentation, an arresting atmosphere, and a charming travel partner make it worth taking a trip down The Midnight Walk.
The Midnight Walk was developed by MoonHood and published by Fast Travel Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR2, and SteamVR.
Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.
