After Midnight

Winter may be cold and unforgiving sometimes, but it is quite a beautiful season, at least if you take the time to appreciate it. The cold is also a great reason to enjoy the warm comfort of your home, or even better, the magical warmth radiating from a fireplace. Hence, log cabins in the mountains are the perfect places to relax for a while and enjoy nature at its finest.

After Midnight is a short adventure game in which you have to solve a few puzzles and explore a rather cramped environment, with not much of a story in the background. However, it’s the general mood and story that create a pleasant atmosphere, thanks to the nice level design and the off-beat graphic style that although seems lazy, it goes quite well with everything else.

You play the role of a character that wakes in the middle of the night with a purpose, although it’s not exactly clear what this purpose is. The goal is quite simple, on the other hand, since all you have to do is to explore the cabin and find a few items to take with you on a journey outside. Hence, your clothes and a handgun are the objects required to leave the cabin, and they are not hard to find at all.

Once you go outside, things get a tad weird. In fact, you have to search fuel cells for your spaceship, so it’s a pretty sudden change in theme and pace. There are no shooting sequences or action of any kind, on the other hand, so you can still relax by taking a walk among the pine trees. You can even play with rockets and light their fuse to see them ascend to the sky.

As mentioned before, the graphics are not flashy in any way, but they go very well with the general atmosphere. Some of the objects are actually just untextured polygons and you won’t even be able to guess what they stand for, but there’s enough detail in the environment to transmit the right idea. On the other hand, you have to watch out for major optimization issues, since the game is quite slow and buggy.

All things considered, After Midnight is not much of a game, because it can be finished in about ten minutes. Its power lies in the atmosphere, however, because it can instantly make you crave the warmth of a fireplace.