PLATFORM: PC (REVIEWED), XBOX SERIES | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Taking place in a remote petrol station somewhere in early-90s America, Shift At Midnight tasks players with keeping the shelves stocked while serving a strange and unpredictable assortment of customers during a series of 13 particularly eventful night shifts. For reasons unknown, some of the customers are alien life forms masquerading as humans, and you’ll need to weed out these doppelgangers and prevent them from leaving the store. Accidentally pick on an actual human and you’ll incur a penalty at the end of the shift, but any doppelgangers left alive will summon a murderous entity…
Borrowing from the increasingly popular simulator and social deduction genres, Shift At Midnight is perfectly playable solo but is definitely at its best when you team up with a couple of other players, where you can argue over your reasons for suspecting customers motives, blame each other for murdering innocent civilians, and help each other to survive in the event of a full-scale invasion. As each shift progresses, you’ll be visited by a parade of unusual characters whose authenticity can be verified by checking their ID against a database, questioning them and closely observing their appearance. If you decide they’re human, you simply scan their purchases and allow them to leave, but if you suspect the worst, a quick bullet to the head is all that’s needed (followed by a bit of elbow grease from the clean-up crew, using the mop and bin bags provided).
If any doppelgangers escape, you can expect a visit from “the entity”, a gangly spider-like monstrosity that can track your location through both the sound of your in-game movements as well as any noise made by players through their microphones. It’s up to you whether you want to try to take it down using traps and weapons from the emergency bunker or hide and hope for the best, but your plans are often likely to be thrown off-course by all sorts of unexpected surprises, no matter which option you choose. As you progress through the game, the customers get weirder and the entity and its companions become more determined to catch you out, leading to all kinds of hi-jinks and hilarity as you and your co-op buddies try to coordinate your tactics.
Lasting around 2 hours for a full playthrough, Shift At Midnight might not be the longest game but its randomly generated shifts mean that repeat playthroughs will usually offer something that you didn’t encounter the last time around. Its cast of characters is a strong point, with some truly unique customers, quirky personalities and memorable dialogue, and the game throws a handful of confusing and unsettling situations into the mix that play with your expectations in some incredibly creative ways. The detective/deduction side of things is a real hoot, and the chaos that ensues when the entity arrives is never anything less than ridiculously entertaining. Well worth a try!
