Shockingly great debut for INTERIOR/NIGHT that breathes some welcome life into the interactive drama game genre that Quantic Dream, Telltale, and Supermassive have been crafting stories in for some time. The depth of the in-chapter branching paths is incredible and inspires multiple playthroughs to see what could go differently. Despite some clear paths merging in the end, which is very normal for this genre as you can only create so many alternate possibilities without the scope of a game like this ballooning out of control, I still felt there were plenty of end-result options to be achieved and it left me very curious (and pretty proud of our first go results where we kept everyone alive).
The characters are well-developed for the most part. I wasn't a huge fan of the voice acting for all of them, though. Sometimes they came off as amateurish, but that could also partially be due to the fact that they are not speaking with lips moving but narrating over the unique art style. At times, I really dug the beautiful still backgrounds and hand-drawn characters that shifted from one to another but weren't actually animated, but at times it was incredibly off-putting and distracting from the situations as they almost felt like they left streaks across the screen as the images changed. It's ambitious for sure and not having any movement added a sense of weight to the choices we make, which is the only gameplay outside of QTEs.
The biggest praise for the characters that we ultimately felt very close to some of them, so much so that at times we'd freeze unable to make a critical choice for 5 minutes or so because we just didn't know what option we wanted to go with. That is a testament to how we subtly become attached to them through the really cool Coen Brothers-esque story. It's like a prestigious HBO Max crime drama that this film critic absolutely was sucked deep into. And that's also why it ending with several loose ends and on a major cliffhanger was a bit unsatisfying. Since there is no sequel announced for this, it felt like we got an incomplete story, and one that I really wanted the full details of.
All things considered this is just a stellar new entry into this genre and I am excited to see what INTERIOR/NIGHT does next.
The characters are well-developed for the most part. I wasn't a huge fan of the voice acting for all of them, though. Sometimes they came off as amateurish, but that could also partially be due to the fact that they are not speaking with lips moving but narrating over the unique art style. At times, I really dug the beautiful still backgrounds and hand-drawn characters that shifted from one to another but weren't actually animated, but at times it was incredibly off-putting and distracting from the situations as they almost felt like they left streaks across the screen as the images changed. It's ambitious for sure and not having any movement added a sense of weight to the choices we make, which is the only gameplay outside of QTEs.
The biggest praise for the characters that we ultimately felt very close to some of them, so much so that at times we'd freeze unable to make a critical choice for 5 minutes or so because we just didn't know what option we wanted to go with. That is a testament to how we subtly become attached to them through the really cool Coen Brothers-esque story. It's like a prestigious HBO Max crime drama that this film critic absolutely was sucked deep into. And that's also why it ending with several loose ends and on a major cliffhanger was a bit unsatisfying. Since there is no sequel announced for this, it felt like we got an incomplete story, and one that I really wanted the full details of.
All things considered this is just a stellar new entry into this genre and I am excited to see what INTERIOR/NIGHT does next.