Reviews
[Review] ‘Neverwinter Nights’ on Switch is Overwhelming, Yet Enticing
Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, the closest BioWare ever came to making a horror game, is out now on Nintendo Switch*.
*It also came out on PS4 and Xbox One this week! But, I spent 25 hours playing this baby the way 100-hour RPGs were meant to be played and you should to: sprawled on the couch with the Switch three inches away from my face, while Great British Bake-Off played in the background.
The game isn’t especially scary — though you’ll hear plenty of shrieks, wails, and cries of “Don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave me!” as you roleplay your way through Neverwinter, a walled city under siege by a horrifying plague with no easily discernible cause. The sickness doesn’t spread through physical contact, and even those under quarantine have managed to contract the disease.
As a newly graduated member of the city guard, you are tasked with helping the powerful paladin, Aribeth, collect the ingredients for the cure. As the game begins, Aribeth has rounded up the cryptids whose bodies house the required ingredients. But, a mysterious and coordinated strike against the city scatters the creatures across four of Neverwinter’s districts. Your journey will take you through a prison now ruled by the inmates, the city docks**, the Blacklake District** and the Beggars Nest — a poor district beset by a horde of zombies shambling in from the neighboring cemetery.
**I haven’t visited these areas yet. This game is big — this version includes the main campaign, two lengthy expansions, and various player-created modules — and, I’ve tried to sample some of everything it has to offer.
If you’re anything like me, that set-up is relentlessly interesting. I missed Neverwinter Nights when it first released back in 2002 (I was eight), so the appeal of playing through that story, that takes players on a quest, not through high fantasy plains and mountains, but through the socioeconomic strata of a city in crisis was really exciting to me. The idea of doing it on a portable system was especially appealing. And, there’s a lot here to be excited about!
That said, if your entry point to the RPG has been the modern offerings from Bethesda, CD Projekt Red or even BioWare, you’ll need to plan to do plenty of work to get the most out of Neverwinter Nights. In 2019, this RPG, which was “mainstream” for its time, may require a wiki to enjoy.
Combat, its pacing and its execution, is especially tricky. Pacing is a pain point because Neverwinter Nights offers very few opportunities to grind, but seems to expect it. In one dungeon in the Shadows of Undrentide expansion, I went from being at equivalent levels with the enemies I was facing, to vastly underleveled for the bosses. This may be intentional — designed then, and retained now, to push players to seek out multiplayer companions — but for me, someone who is mostly interested in playing this game by myself, it’s a bummer. And, given that enemies don’t respawn after you defeat them, grinding the levels isn’t really an option.
Even if it was, combat is the least enjoyable part of Neverwinter Nights, so I’m not itching to seek out more of it. After 25 hours, I still haven’t gotten to a place where I feel comfortable with the game’s pause-and-play system. Generally, I think it just feels antiquated. The game’s devotion to its Dungeons and Dragons source material means that you’ll frequently miss point-blank hits, even on easy, because a die roll says so. I understand why BioWare, and other developers of turn-of-the-century CRPGs, opted for this system. The semi-real time, semi-turn-based combat was a good fit for online play in an era of spotty Internet connections. But, today, it feels like a chore; neither as satisfyingly tactical as the system Larian used for the Divinity Original Sin games, or as responsive as the clicks in an action RPG like Diablo. Being old and out-of-style doesn’t make a mechanic bad. Recent throwback shooters Dusk and Ion Fury each resurrected the 90s FPS’ story-lite blasting to great effect! But… the combat here feels like a compromise designed to address a problem that no longer exists.
That said, Beamdog has done an excellent job faithfully porting this game to Switch. The developer has been tasked with bringing an era of D and D games to consoles — Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment all also came to Switch this year thanks to the company’s efforts — and has succeeded admirably. The current streaming-fueled Dungeons and Dragons renaissance, plus the success of Pillars of Eternity, the Divinity Original Sin games and Disco Eysium have all helped bring the isometric RPG back into prominence. And now, thanks to Beamdog, some of the genre’s most important classics are available on every major platform. That’s a really cool, important achievement.
Especially given the fact Beamdog has put in the work to make Neverwinter Nights a great fit for consoles. While the original game featured an entirely isometric perspective, the Enhanced Edition allows you to control your adventurer from a third-person perspective. You can still use the pulled-back perspective to see more of the play space and queue up actions. But, most of the time, the game looks like a low-poly version of a modern console RPG.
The transition isn’t always entirely smooth. I ran into a progress-blocking bug early on — I walked up to a table toward the end of the tutorial area, got stuck inside of it and couldn’t escape its geometry without starting the game over — that pushed me to save scum the hell out of the rest of my time with the game. I ran into a similar issue later, getting stuck at the entrance*** to a laboratory in Shadows of Undrentide, and had to abandon the save and 30 minutes of progress. Neither of these issues ruined my experience with the game. But, both, combined with the game’s old-fashioned save system, pushed me to play it extremely careful. I saved after every combat encounter for fear of losing progress.
***Doors are generally just pretty weird. I often walked out of a door — one specifically in the main game’s City Core area was a persistent problem — only to re-enter the building I was walking away from.
All those issues aside, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with Neverwinter Nights and plan to play more! There’s a massive amount of content included here, bolstered by an interesting setting and evocative writing. I’ll likely spend a lot of time with it over the holidays.
But, I’ll probably spend just as much time on a wiki.
Neverwinter Nights review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher.
Neverwinter Nights is out on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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