10.21.2008

"Nightfall" by Eric Eve

This is a review of Nightfall by Eric Eve, an entry into IFComp 2008. It contains spoilers.


Nightfall is a brilliant piece of code from which hangs a wide and detailed world and solid prose, but also a few flat characters. The broad-brush characterization, fortunately, does not diminish Eve's other achievements when one takes the game as a whole.

We learn in the introduction that the government of this country (presumably England, though I'm not sure if it ever explicitly tells us this) has ordered a total evacuation: "the Enemy" is coming. We know almost as little as the protagonist about this Enemy, yet we have returned to the city which they will soon occupy in order to find her, a woman with whom the protagonist has been obsessed since primary school. We later learn her name is Emma, yet the PC favors the enigmatic, and somewhat overblown, "her" -- always italicized. She has remained in the city for reasons we do not yet understand, and it's as much of our goal in this game to suss out those reasons as it is to locate her.

Nearly all information about our past is gleaned from memories, which are triggered by visiting many of the city's locations. The first brilliant bit of programming we encounter, then, is the REMEMBER system, which we can use to summon to mind any memory we have previously triggered. We can also RECAP all the memories we've triggered since gameplay began. It isn't long before we start implementing other similarly useful verbs: THINK and THINK HARDER provide us solid leads; GO TO and CONTINUE provide us an easy, logical method of traversing the vast city which is known to the player-character but not to the player.

Nightfall is by no means a difficult game, yet the clues and prompts it provides are subtle enough that one feels brilliant while solving its puzzles. A sense of urgency pervades the text, too, and events are so keenly scheduled that we always feel as though we're one step behind the mystery -- invisible, yet within reach.

Eve also includes several branching paths in this game, each of which feels fleshed-out enough to be the "correct" path. We never feel as if we're straying, but instead as if we're forging ahead into this mysterious night, blazing our own path.

In an abandoned library, I found a computer with access to Google. For laughs, I Googled (in-game) the game's title, assuming I would find an Easter egg, if anything. Instead, I learned that "Nightfall" was the title of a book by an author Emma had recommended to me years ago -- whose name was equally in-game-Googleable. This game generally isn't one to breach the fourth wall, so this bit of meta-gaming actually came off as a bit spooky, especially after I went to the shelves to find the book and to see why Emma had recommended it. The text was very dark, fueled by thanatos. At that moment I began to have my first reservations about Emma. When I Googled the anagram of Emma's name, I knew I was in trouble.

The game had tricked me into thinking I had found out about Emma's dark side before I was supposed to discover it, but I was, in fact, right on track. Eve's sense of pacing is impeccable, and for that alone Nightfall deserves high accolades. I wish the protagonist had expressed a bit more depth about his relationships with other characters. Emma is a beauty of mythic proportions, less human than elemental force. I think Eve should either push Emma further into that mythic realm with the language he uses to describe her or introduce a foreshadowing flaw or two into her personality, revealed through the PC's forgotten memories. Otherwise, I don't think there's a detail of this game I'd change.

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