You know, there's usually some entertainment value to bad games. NightCry, however, manages to not reach even that.

Honestly, I'm not a fan of Clock Tower gameplay. It's boring and interrupts the pacing to give you a chase scene that's almost never tense and is just a bad stealth segment. However, Clock Tower usually had more variation to its hiding places and interesting deaths.

This game has some absolutely hilarious scenes, but maybe only two or three in total - not enough to carry the whole boring adventure.

I have no idea how some of the most prestigious names in gaming managed to come up with this crap, but if you're interested, just watch a playthrough or something.

There's this inexplicable phenomenon in cinema where an undeniably horrible film will end up being loved by a devoted following in part because it's so terrible. It's what's responsible for the old saying "so bad, it's good," and might be the only medium of entertainment where such a thing is truly possible. The closest approximation we've had in gaming is Deadly Premonition, which managed to overcome its various faults and deficiencies to earn itself a strong reputation as a well-respected flawed masterpiece due to the strength of its charmingly quirky vision and writing. That's what was I hoping to get out of NightCry, but while seemingly all the right (wrong?) elements were in place they never came together to create something as endearing.

At first glance this looks like an old-school PS2 era horror throwback what with its fixed camera angles and awkward controls (O is select and X is back for some inexplicable reason), but in reality it's more of a point-and-click adventure title. Which makes sense when you consider that it's coming from Hifumi Kono with the intention of serving as a spiritual successor to his legendary Clock Tower series. In a similar manner to the games it is taking direct inspiration from, there are a lot of unique ideas in regards to how players can influence the narrative and its outcomes. Unfortunately, the apparent lack of technical proficiency from the team at Nude Maker prevents any of them from ever taking off, and I'm not just talking about how the graphics are ugly as sin or the whole thing is riddled with bizarre, frustrating bugs and glitches either. There are some genuine issues with their actual implementation that don't allow them to live up to their interesting potential.

Case in point, you do ANYTHING to deviate from the path of key actions that lead to the true conclusion and the story will come to an abrupt, anticlimactic end out of nowhere. You'll be left baffled on top of unfulfilled when this happens since the expectations placed on you in this regard are sometimes painfully undefined. Entire crucial processes can be missed completely because you didn't somehow magically intuit that you, say, needed to loot a cash register near the start of the game for quarters to use at a very specific vending machine in order to collect the wedding ring off the severed hand that comes out in place of a soda (yeah, a lot of weird stuff happens...) so that it can be given to a character hidden away in the back of a previously visited room several chapters later. The flowchart style screen you'll visit to pick up where you left off or revisit an earlier section that chronicles your progress offers vague hints on what the main tasks necessary to stay on the right track are, but no insight on what must be done to actually accomplish them. How anyone was supposed to figure any of this out without resorting to a walkthrough I have no idea, and I'm fully convinced that most of the people you'll see with a more positive outlook on NightCry only have such an opinion because they used one to bypass experiencing the inherently irritating aspects of its design.

Flaws don't only put a damper on the developer's loftier, more ambitious mechanics however, but the moment-to-moment gameplay as well. There's a ridiculously awful element of trial and error to things. Hope you enjoy instantly dying upon entering a room because you didn't know you were supposed to turn on your phone's flashlight or make a post on the in-game social media app (an action that's required of you maybe only twice, if that) beforehand. The chase sequences that comprise the majority of the action sequences outside of the occasional QTE are exciting in theory as you have no traditional means of defending yourself, forcing you find a hiding spot or tool to temporarily fend off your pursuer, but do little to instill an air of tension once you realize the killer's appearances are entirely scripted after the first level. By far the most tedious problem though is that you often have to interact with people or objects multiple times in a row to progress. I get that's not unheard of for this genre, but I bet the majority of them didn't force you to sit through a loading screen following every click.

Going back to the analogy I began this review with, when it comes to cult classic disasterpiece movies you'd be hard pressed to find one of more renown than Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which lives on in a sort of ironically celebrated infamy that still drives rowdy crowds to midnight screenings for a bit of energetic mockery during the viewing. NightCry may just be the video game equivalent. Like the aforementioned cinematic travesty, it's too bad to legitimately recommend, but if you were to pick it up regardless you'd certainly uncover plenty to laugh at. The plot is so full of holes and missing information that it makes an almost comical lack of sense, and you can be killed in a number of absurdly hilarious ways (death by flying babydoll, anyone?). The save system, sadly the best feature, even makes it relatively easy to witness every goofy, jank, or downright broken inch of this mess for the platinum trophy. The hours it will take from your life however, are likely better spent elsewhere.

4/10