A burlesque dancer struggling to maintain it collectively has a wild evening the place a homicide takes place at her membership, forcing her to play newbie sleuth earlier than her good friend is gunned down. Additionally, she has a psychological situation the place, if she doesn’t take her medicine, she has visions of the longer term and may learn the minds of others.
I do know, I do know… “One other one among these video games?”
Man, I like indie video games. I like that there are individuals on the market who will take an concept nobody else has ever had, and put it out on a system individuals use for saving princesses and combating robots. I particularly admire the best way they take a scarcity of sources, or a intentionally clunky interface, and creatively flip that into an asset with visible panache and an uncommon imaginative and prescient. And One Night time: Burlesque has that in spades.
It’s a brief sport. You possibly can end it in a few hours. Additionally, it’s not a lot of a sport; it’s fueled largely by dialogue as you interrogate potential suspects, and there’s barely any ingredient of likelihood in interactive elements.
However it’s finished in such a bizarre method I couldn’t assist being compelled by it.
One Night time: Burlesque is instructed in a collection of nonetheless frames which might be evenly animated; the digital camera will transfer over a detailed up of a dancer to point motion, and characters will abruptly change their posture to point a change in temper. Textual content will seem abruptly, usually as a personality’s intrusive ideas, and visible results like shade separation are used to point psychological states. All of it jogs my memory of one thing you’d see on MTV’s Liquid Tv; low funds, however attention-grabbing.
It’s tempting to name One Night time: Burlesque a visible novel, although it’s strikingly totally different from many video games of that style. Your decisions don’t change the story a lot (although they may have an effect), and regardless of the way you query everybody, it gained’t change the trail of the story, simply the way you understand it.
As for the bits which might be interactive, they’re largely fabricated from awkward interactions (intentional, I assume) with the world: shaking a capsule bottle, making a cocktail, attempting to get a capsule in your mouth.
The opposite huge one is if you use your psychic talents (or psychotic breaks, relying on the way you need to learn the story) to learn the minds of others. You’ll get flashes of their agitation, their reminiscences, finished in a really Lynchian type that matches in with each their emotional state and the protagonist’s crumbling sense of actuality.
The road artwork illustrations are easy however evocative, one thing like a ’60s Playboy illustration—barely naughty quite than erotic.
One facet I actually need to name out is the music and sound design. Mixed with the best way scenes are edited, they offer each sudden reveal, each emotional breakdown, a deeper impression.
It’s blunt pressure, however it’s additionally—like the sport itself—efficient.