We’ve all seen The Never Ending Story; it’s that 80’s classic fantasy epic where the kid reads a book and goes to a magical world with a giant white dragon that looks high and his horse who is majorly depressed and drowned in a lake of sadness. It’s a crazy film if you were an 80’s kid, and it became something of a trend came about with the film’s popularity. Most films failed or flopped due to this narrative type, and it was left alone over the years. But now it seems some designers may have brought us something of The Never Ending Story meets Full House (with no terrible acting or Olsen Twins but plenty of depressing drama). In the oddly named Between Me and the Night (I don’t get the name either).
Between Me and the Night is a surrealistic adventure taking place over a time span of three decades and within a fantasy epic. It’s laced with metaphors and symbolisms that dive into the realm of childhood traumas, teenage dilemmas and middle age tragedies. We take on the role of nameless red head male who we visit through various stages of their life as a child, teenager and young adult having to overcome certain tasks that represent trauma in his life. Through solving various puzzles in each life stage, our player will in return go on an epic quest to find the source of the problem. The experience, enhanced by the game’s graphical representation, is simply beautiful. It’s minimalist in a sense but also is chock filled with detail and symbolism. The visuals, accompanied by a beautiful soundtrack will surely give you the feels when playing.
What we have is a pretty impressive concept that’s wonderfully surreal and captivating from the get go. Each location as our hero’s different ages is like visiting a dream like world filled with bizarre dangers and obscure problem solving. We go to our hero’s childhood home, his high school and current living state in order to solve different puzzles, take a glimpse at the many issues he’s experienced and overcome the troubles for a clear resolution in his later life. Exploration is key to success as locations vast in detail, and there is a vast amount of interactions to be had. Dozens of objects can be picked up such as cassette players, fake skulls and underpants, which can be collected but not all have purpose in the game world.
There are items which are vital to solving puzzles while others have little importance or none at all. But this method brings us an intense puzzle element of deduction with trial and error. Problems come in all shapes and sizes from simply opening a garden shed, to overcoming a giant lawnmower beast! We have certain foes in each memory that wonder around in an attempt to consume you , but you can foil them dead in their tracks with the use of the environment or multiple disposable items that can save your life. Yet the danger here is minimal as you’re normally taken to a certain spot in the level and continue as you were without any setbacks. It’s also an issue when the level doesn’t have checkpoints. This doesn’t help if you’re planning on taking a break from all the brain numbing puzzle antics and many of them do take some time to figure out. So what I did was just close the laptop and continue.
At the end of each memory our nameless lead jumps into an arcade machine which teleports him into a segment of an epic fantasy adventure. These levels bring forth a stronger action adventure element where the knight will have to traverse a mountain landscape, battling undead warriors and finding the source of all pain at the top of an epically tall tower. These are great, a chance to increase the pace, and they are pretty enjoyable considering the simple design and mechanics. However, there were a fair few glitches during these segments in particular, such as falling through the game world and freezing up when fighting. It’s extremely annoying when it happened way too often in the second fantasy level. Odd thing is the further the game progresses, the glitches do thin out. It’s a good sign but at times, these become infuriating. Also you can’t change the keyboard mapping, so pressing the shift button, space button and left button on the mouse of your laptop is a massive pain!
The major problem I had with Between Me and the Night was the game’s climax. You get an emotional connection for the character and understand his downfall, but the actual end of the game feels a little shallow and pretentious. There’s even an achievement which states “I don’t get it.” I do get it, and it’s fairly lazy and empty for a few reasons. First of all, we get the character who is down on his luck and things aren’t going so well, but we get no reason as to why or what really has happened. Braid had a sense of structure even if you may not get the full picture that Tim is the bad guy. As you play through his memories and find out the truth, Braid tells the story in a beautifully metaphorical way that he’s a major douche. Here, we get a character we feel something towards but don’t fully understand why, who he really is or if we should care. He represents everyone with being in debit, losing someone he loves but at the end there are so many mixed messages about what you should feel. Is he bad, good, evil? We don’t know.
The end could have blended the fantasy and real world elements together for a shocking/twist ending. I won’t spoil too much, but it’s lacking in depth and any real substance. We get the vague idea of what might be happening but nothing is solid nor experienced/hinted to make a guess. I felt as though there should’ve been multiple endings but to my dissatisfaction, there isn’t. However the whole escapism feature of the fantasy world is cool. Despite that, multiple endings or allowing the main a character to die after jumping off the roof could have made things a little more interesting, as appose to respawning a few feet away. The ending just didn’t feel like it closed the gaps from the plot.
Between Me and the Night is an engaging and at times thought provoking adventure with some great puzzle elements. For the most part, the experience is very good – apart from some minor hiccups with some pretty damning glitches on various levels -, but the game has a confusing ending. Still this is definitely worth checking out.
A PC code for Between Me and the night was provided by RainDance LX for the purpose of this review