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The Night Is Grey - hand-drawn pointing and clicking

Talking about this game without spoiling it feels too hard so I'll summarise my opinion here and then move onto specifics. If you simply like how the game looks, generally enjoy narrative more than puzzles, possess the patience to withstand some unresponsiveness, and are interested in experiencing a mature story, this is a point-and-click game for you.

I've enjoyed many adventure games and mostly focused on playing ones that adhere to the classic Lucasarts formula: strong focus on good puzzles. Lately I've opened up to ones that are more like visual novels than puzzle games. In the end most adventure games tend to be something inbetween those two. Somewhere there we can find The Night Is Grey too.

The Night Is Grey's strength is not in its puzzles but rather in its visuals, athmosphere, and story. This is not a case of too much "moon logic" meaning the puzzles do make sense but too often end up feeling a bit tedious. One especially tiresome puzzle took place in the mines, in which selecting a wrong room to go into just killed you. Luckily it was easy to bruteforce by savescumming. In a given puzzle situation there's usually some distance between the places of interest requiring clicking through multiple screens whilst traveling. Sometimes the game has the decency to teleport the player to the obviously right location but usually only if a certain storybeat is about to end. More than once I resorted to using a guide after I lost my patience and wanted to just advance the story. Now talking about the story...

There's not too many hints of the larger narrative until the last third of the game. Before that it's pretty straightforward and simple, the player has a clear goal and while achieving that they get to know the characters of Graham and Hannah. They are nice characters. Both are funny and express enough of themselves to convey a sense of actual personhood. So much so that I felt both happy and sad leaving Hannah to her grandparents. She gets to be safe after a scary adventure but Graham ends up being alone again. When solving some of the last puzzles I had the realisation "this story is gonna be a loop of somekind isn't it". Sure enough I was right, Graham ends up where we started with him and we learn that Hannah's mother was missing because we (or Graham?) killed her. Cannot say it was the ending I was hoping for but then again it doesn't need to be.

In adventure games the playable character usually has a lot to say about everything the player clicks on and so does Graham. The thing is that Graham appears to be saying all those things out loud. Hannah as a child doesn't mind but when meeting another adult character face to face for the first time they immediately comment that Graham is weird. Well, turns out he's a schizophrenic hobo and in a more humorous game this would be its way of saying that "aren't all adventure game characters like that?".

Overall The Night Is Grey feels a bit unresponsive, scene transitions and skipping dialogue feels slow. Input delay became most apparent in a minigame section right before the end. This jankiness rendered the otherwise nice scene weird and had me thinking "Why am I doing this?". My computer refuses to take a hit to its ego and firmly believes it's not a hardware issue. Enough good moments within the game make me feel overall positive about it. I haven't really mentioned the art because I kinda got accustomed to how great it was after marveling it for the first part of the game. It's strong throughout and after the story leaving me cold it ends up being the best part of the whole experience. I mean, a human hand coming out a wolf's mouth is cool.