Developer: Bubby Darkstar
Release Date: October 28, 2021
MSRP: $9.99
Might as well get right to the point – Subway Midnight barely feels like a game at all. It’s like a haunted house ride at a carnival – all show and no substance. Which is not to say it’s without any merit at all – the show is reasonably good. The art is weirdly cute & creepy, and it sounds like you’re on a subway, but after spending more than 20 minutes doing little more than walking in a straight line and trying to interact with things that cannot be interacted with, I’m not really sure that the show is quite good enough in this case.
Considering that the entire game can be played through in a couple of hours, according to HowLongToBeat, that’s far too long for nothing of significance to happen. Heck, even in a longer game, I don’t want to just be soaking up atmosphere for almost half an hour. I did encounter a couple of “puzzles” (and using the word puzzle here is generous), but there didn’t even seem to be much in the way of environmental storytelling in the portion of the game I played. Sure, you’re seeing missing posters, but you can’t actually read any of them, and picking up items and putting them into electrical sockets does not compelling game play make.
Subway Midnight definitely presses the buttons of being spooky, maybe even nudging into scary territory in some spots, but I’m not sure there’s enough of anything here to make it worth two hours of the player’s time. Maybe I’m impatient and it was just about to get interesting, but my tolerance for walking in a straight line was exhausted.
SteamDB estimates that Subway Midnight has sold between 14,700 and 40,300 copies on Steam. While some reviewers found it as tedious as I did, many more were intrigued enough to play it through to completion and would recommend it for fans of walking simulators. It is ranked 1526 out of 10,967 games released in 2021.
Nerd Girl Thoughts 