Midnight Murder Club Review (PC)

There’s nothing quite like succumbing to a passive-aggressive, albeit serendipitous act of being a tongue-in-cheek jerk with a flashlight and a revolver in a pitch-black mansion. It’s like I’m eight years old all over again; I have this finger gun in one hand, and I’m giggling in the corner whilst another of my friends tiptoes between the crags and crevices of a familiar place—a questionably dingy backyard, usually—in an attempt to snuff out my location and ping a spud gun pellet at my forehead. Funnily enough, I have that same sense of adolescent giddiness floating around in my head at the moment, in this peculiar world of woeful corridors, wildly inappropriate traps, and sniggering adults who may or may not be aware of how much I’m loving the mere thought of being able to thwart their actions. It’s Midnight Murder Club — and I’m staying till dawn, baby.

The clock has just struck midnight, and so, naturally, the murderers have come out of their shells to wax their bullets and wage war with the world. As it turns out, though, I’m one of the murderers, and I’m also one of the same kind who much prefer to stealthily ignore the proximity chat and delve straight into the brush of the gloomy night. In here, in this seemingly decrepit moonlit mansion, all bets are off; it’s every man, woman, and ghoul for themselves, and only one of us will have the opportunity to crack open the vault and claim sanctuary over the other cattle on the farm. It’s dark, and the flashlight is burning hot in my hands — though I dare not flick the switch, for the moment I choose to illuminate my whereabouts, the wolves will swoop in for the kill. The darkness, sadly, is my only hope.

Lights Out

At its core, Midnight Murder Club is a first-person multiplayer survival horror with a comedic twist. The game, which sees several players descending into the opaque corridors of a lavish mansion, invites you, one of the prestigious club members, to don the mask, grab a flashlight and revolver, and plunge deep into the darkness—a place where you will find a mixture of environmental chaos, creepily vacant quarters, and the subtle sounds of pattering feet tiptoeing between rooms in search of a viable target. Like a lamb to the slaughter, each player is given the same ultimatum: use the flashlight to help navigate the mansion, but at the cost of highlighting their location, or discard said flashlight to conceal their identity and essentially operate from the shadows — like a typical, albeit slightly annoying cloak-and-dagger Jack the Ripper apprentice.

This mansion, which serves as the centerpiece for the game, isn’t just the home to a band of ragtag killers; it’s the cesspit for countless traps and forms of sinful destruction. It starts out simple: the group delves deep into the mansion, and, with the power to deceive their opponents in the palms of their hands, embark on a rather sadistic quest to manipulate the board and outsmart the other club associates. Herein lies a problem: the mansion is in absolute darkness, which means each player has to resort to tuning into their proximity chats to unravel the whereabouts of other representatives, and use a combination of tactical maneuvers, weapons and traps, and, for the sake of toying with the possibility that they may or may not be where they say they are, flicking the switch of a flashlight to expose crucial information to bring others out of hiding.

After Desert

There’s a lot more to carve out of Midnight Murder Club than the single scenario — and that’s great, as mindlessly killing other folk wouldn’t make for a drawn-out story, let’s be honest. No, thankfully, the game does also offer a substantial amount of dynamic episodes and objective-based gameplay options for you to pick away at. Take the mansion, for example. In addition to the bread and butter communal goal—to eliminate other players with a revolver, for the most part—there are also several other things to consider, like vaults, for example, which often include various perks, tools, and items of interest, like night vision pills, for instance. The map, which takes great pride in its simplicity and shadowy architecture, is also rife with a lot of things to unearth, meaning, while you are alone in the dark, there are oh-so many secrets to the world and its Victorian heritage.

To state the obvious, Midnight Murder Club isn’t your natural-born horror; in fact, it’s more of a comedy, in the sense that players are more likely to giggle, slip up, or accidentally expose their identities than pop out from beneath the woodwork to initiate a well-oiled jump scare. But that’s sort of what this is: a simple game of hide-and-seek with a violent twist; the childhood game Murder in the Dark springs to mind here. Also, with a solid selection of objectives, traps, and other features to sift through, it makes it so that each descent into the rabbit hole is entirely different and unique from the previous one. And to be clear, replay value is a key component that any multiplayer game should have, of which Midnight Murder Club has by the boot and laces, tenfold.

Verdict

I’m over the moon to be a small cog in the wheel of this prestigious network of immature slaughterers. I’m thankful, in ways, that the inner adolescent in me has been given another opportunity to wreak havoc on a virtual space after nigh-on twenty years of falling victim to another mechanism—adulthood, and the many, many joys it so often brings. Midnight Murder Club is a tremendous amount of fun, and while it can be a little intimidating at times, it’s arguably some of the best fun I’ve had in weeks — months, even. It’s a simple concept, and one that could quite easily be compared with other beloved games based on death and deception, but it’s also a piece of art that brings its own brand of storytelling and innovative design to the cauldron, too.

If you’ve been itching to rekindle those former days of playing hide-and-seek with your closest pals, then you’re in luck, as Midnight Murder Club is officially onboarding new members for its cult-like shenanigans and killing spree marathons. Take it from me—the kid who once received a pellet to the forehead and asked if he could play again, despite having an ultraviolet bruise on the upper eye socket. If you’re the sort of person who gets a kick out of roaming around in the dark and playing spot the difference with a lampshade and the grimacing face of a revolver-sporting killer — then chances are you’ll absolutely adore just about everything that fleshes out Midnight Murder Club and its Victorian roots.