NOCLIP Pocket E89 - A Weird Skin Disease - Midnight Manor

Welcome home. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re talking
about Midnight Manor, a late entry suggestion for Pocket this
Halloween that ended up probably saving our schedule. Midnight
Manor is a short horror-themed platformer from a solo developer
that encourages players to play the game multiple times in
different ways to see all the narrative possibilities it has to
offer. Mechanically speaking, the game is simple, revolving around
carrying items necessary for progression from place to place and
navigating the titular manor. This simple gameplay lends itself, in
a way, to the multiple ending-based design of the game, encouraging
you to make small optimizations to make each successive run a bit
faster, but admittedly does very little to make the game more
engaging to go through each time. With no enemies, and therefore no
fail state, to speak of, what is left to really engage with lies in
its atmosphere, music, art and narrative content. All of these
things are subjective, but given the short time investment to
actually complete the game, and even seeing all the endings isn’t
going to add all that much to your total playtime, it is likely
worth the low barrier to entry to playing. We’re going to be
talking about how character design can raise questions and eyebrows
and our thoughts on the intentionality of it, what vibes the
presentational aspects of the game put off, and we theorize on what
this game may be a sequel to. Thank you for joining us again this
week! Midnight Manor was a strangely nostalgic experience that
harked back to indie games during our more experimental years when
we were just trying anything we could find. That said, it’s a mixed
bag, though still more polished and with more thought than you
might expect from a project that was this tiny. Did Midnight Manor
send you back to a simpler time? Did it get you to play through it
more than once? Let us know in the comments, or over in the
Discord, where the suggestion for this game came from. As I said at
the beginning, our time was rather tight this month, and our last
Halloween game is going to bleed over into November a little bit,
but we’re always happy to try weird things for October and this
certainly qualifies. Next time, we’re going to be talking about
Anodyne for a bit more of an adventure-y feel for November, so be
sure to check back with us then!