![]() It essentially amounts to one major story arc and a bunch of dead ends along the way, all triggered by the player’s decisions. ![]() See, one of NightCry‘s claims to fame (and inspirations from Clock Tower) is its branching plot. ![]() Finishing NightCry would require me to restart from the very beginning. I discovered this on my fourth attempt to finish the segment, whereupon I realized that neither of the chapter’s checkpoints took me back far enough to undo these decisions. In fact, using them actually triggers another scripted death further down the line. One would think that these would figure into a scene in which the protagonist slides too far down a rope, but no. It’s worth mentioning that a pair of slip-proof gloves can be found earlier in the level. If this action is not completed, the character will suffer an unavoidable, scripted death later in the chapter because he shrugged off an obtuse radio-tuning puzzle while he had a working cell phone in hand. If it sounds like I’m nitpicking, consider that one of the game’s life-or-death puzzles involves tuning an archaic radio to call for help while the character has a working cell phone with a perfect signal on a desert island. Both the ship and a nearby desert island are even littered with charging stations. NightCry is set on a cruise ship overrun with a zombie-like cult and a monster called the “Scissorwalker.” Immediately, this setting presents a maddening problem: Here’s one of the few modern horror stories with a solid excuse for its characters not having decent cell phone coverage… and yet they all have perfect signals. But, when my progress in the game’s middle chapter was wiped for the fourth consecutive time-twice due to crashes and twice thanks to my “choices” having wholly unrelated consequences-the joke stopped being funny. For all I know, the laughs here are intentional a deliberate throwback to the awkward animations and cheesy line readings that make Clock Tower a cult favorite. NightCry is a spiritual successor to Clock Tower, a point-and-click horror series that popped up in the mid-’90s, back when games were still rather silly. I can’t take the game seriously at this point, and it’s just getting started. The steward coughs up a lung (by which I mean there is literally a lung hanging out of his mouth) and the heroine snatches the key card from his corpse with a hilariously mercenary expression on her face. Moments later, apropos of nothing, a food cart takes on a life of its own and smashes a room steward against a wall. The terrors of NightCry kick off with the heroine’s friend being violently pulled into a vending machine and a hooded figure with a large pair of shears rising from a pool of the guy’s blood. WTF The hero saying point-blank that he doesn’t have anything important to post on Twitter. LOW Finally getting a sequence right, only to have the game crash.
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