Fun concept, intriguing ‘psychic’ mechanic.
Nice visual style, with limited animation. The depiction of mental health is a bit iffy and sometimes things go a bit too fast. It is short (like 2 hours) so nothing overstays its welcome. It had some typos/grammar errors but I see this isn’t an English-based company so it makes sense. I think a more streamlined and longer game with this psychic mechanic would be fun, curious what they make next. If you wanna check this out, get it on sale, I got it for like $2.

I am sitting at home alone sipping oral rehydration fluid and periodically going to the upstairs lavatory on this christmas day, the culprit? Hard to say, my Mum ate the same (albeit slightly undercooked imo) food and is feeling fine, so perhaps some kind of stomach bug. Away from my main PC and too sick to drive home, I played One Night : Burlesque.

I don't mean this as a putdown, but its clear that ON:B was developed on a rather small budget. I had never heard of the Warsaw Based RedDeer games before but it looked like the kind of adventure game that could get my mind off of feeling like shit and that it provided.

ON:B clocked in at around 2 hours for me, which underscores both the limited resources the game is working with and that what flaws the game does have are nowhere near enough to be dealbreakers and overstay its brief welcome.

Its a detective story set in a Burlesque club with a slight fantastical (or sci fi fi maybe?) element involving the main character's mind reading abilities. I soon transitioned from "Im playing this I guess" to "Ooh, thats an interesting idea" very early on when its revealed that in this universe mind readers are medicated to control their symptoms as their abilities are classified as essentially a mental condition akin to Personality Disorders. Now, obviously when you are writing on such matters you are opening yourself to criticism if your depiction is inaccurate or the comparison to real life conditions is made poorly or offensively, but I think its mostly well done in this respect.

Now admittedly, the idea might be pushed a bit at points in the excessive simulation of analogues for anxiety disorders, but I personally did not ever do a double take at some poorly thought out metaphor or the like. That being said, my ADHD is not really similar to any of the stand in conditions so perhaps others will find it more objectionable.

Either way, I find it an interesting idea I havent seen explored before, pathologies are generally treated as such due to their interference with every day function and their comparative rarity, so if people could read minds irl and even had trouble being able to "turn it off" without medication or training/treatment, well yeah that would be highly distressting. There are even laws in the game regulating its use and prejudice expressed by some reactionaries in game, although now that I think about it our protagonist makes judicious use of her abilities which might committ the cardinal sin of justifying the in universe prejudice? Well, the ableist characters are all villains basically and she is trying to stop the future murder of her best friend so I think that concern is ameliorated somewhat.

The writing, whilst not incredible, has a good grasp of character voice, pretty important in a voiceless VN. The structure is very fast paced and fragmentary, which is a bit of a problem when dealing with a detective story. At the end I was asked "Okay so who did it!(or is going to do, rather)" and I was taken by surprise, there had not been much time to stew on the facts. Appropriate, perhaps, for a story centered around a single night of cabaret and a frantic investigation before the finale.

Gameplay wise its a potpourri of minigames, dialogue choices and intertitles from the MC's perspective. It reminds me of the kind of cool european indie comics you would stumble across before eventually just going to the manga aisle as usual. I would compare it to something like OxenFree or Night in the Woods maybe, just a lot more brief of course.

Its an interesting phenomenon with adventure games, very story focused (and puzzle focused with the point and clicks) but feel the need to break it up somehow. I was somewhat reminded of Svoboda 1945, the Czech adv game about the Sudeten region and its history, or even Pentiment. I think the usage of small tactile minigames and sections are not unwelcome, so long as they never become too elaborate or different from what you have been doing to feel nonsensical/frustrating - looking at you, arcade sections in sierra adventure games! The earliest sequence springs to mind, in medias res the player is thrown into quickly finding the protagonist's meds before they need to rush into the stage. Not so memorable are the various mind reading sections, because they all require essentially the same minigame similar to Oxenfree's radio knob frequency twiddling.

In the end, I think ON:B manages to create a compelling enough experience for its runtime (and absolutely tiny asking price on switch currently) and gave me something to think about in between throwing up sessions. It took me so long to write this on my phone that I'm actually already feeling a bit better lmao. Happy Holidays Everyone

Post Script 31/12
Should add that the game was heavily discounted but sold with DLC which ended up being just concept art/artbook? Seems like a strange business model but I imagine for a small Warsaw based studio you need to play the storefront tactics, especially on switch. God, the eshop is such a fucking shitshow now. Happy New Year Everyone!