Midnight Caravan (PC) - Review
by Paul Broussard , posted on 25 May 2021 / 2,152 Views
The life of a wanted criminal is a difficult one. Spending days fighting for your life, breaking whatever rules are necessary to survive. Tenuous alliances formed and broken when necessary. Numerous games have tackled the topic of the criminal underworld, and some have managed to capture the myriad of complexities and moral ambiguities that come with living a life outside of the law. Midnight Caravan... is not one of those games, and instead presents us with a text-based choose your own adventure game that has so many issues it might just be a crime itself.
First impressions count for a lot in games, especially so for ones that aren’t particularly mechanically complex. Midnight Caravan’s story stumbles on this front right out of the gate. Our protagonist’s backstory is established as an individual who had his reputation ruined... somehow... by a mysterious figure named Cassini. Apparently this Cassini figure holds enough sway over the police to not only fabricate charges against you, but then direct them as to personally hunt you down, and so the protagonist is forced to flee town and begin life anew as the leader of an illegal gambling and prostitution establishment.
None of this is inherently bad in theory, but the game rushes through its introduction so quickly that there’s hardly a chance to get the player invested in anything. While I understand the desire to keep the player character a blank slate, at least letting the player experience the events that led to said character's descent into crime would have been helpful for establishing context, and perhaps more importantly, made me care about what was going on. How did this Cassini ruin my reputation? What lies were spread? What crimes was I even run out of town on? Who are some of the people I founded my apparently lucrative gambling and prostitution business with? The phrase “show, don’t tell” remains just as true even in visual novels, and letting us play through this downfall would do a lot to connect the player with the world, much more so than just basically handing them the spark notes for the game’s lore at the start.
Once you’re past the introduction, Midnight Caravan actually begins properly, and can perhaps best be described as a very long game of attempting to manage resources. The player is set up with four major elements to try and manage: fame, health, money, and suspicion. Fame and money are predominantly used for unlocking additional choices over the course of the game, while health and suspicion will cause instant game overs if they dip too low or rise too high respectively. The different choices you make throughout the title will affect the status of each of these.
I say “attempt to manage,” because it’s pretty difficult to predict where some of these decisions will lead based on the text prompts provided. On one occasion, I was given the choice to either protect, hand over, or bargain with a female murderer on the run. Naturally, as a criminal mastermind, I ain’t no snitch, but I’m also going to make sure I get something out of the agreement, so I chose the barter option, whereupon my character immediately sexually manipulated the murderer and gained an extra suspicion point with each passing day. Not quite what I had in mind when I clicked the bargain option.
This does tie into one of the larger frustrations with Midnight Caravan, which is that for a mechanic built largely around trying to manage the four elements, there aren’t all that many ways to consistently and reliably do so. Trying to balance these various gauges could have been an interesting way to add some genuine depth to an otherwise straightforward choose your own adventure, but opportunities to increase health or decrease suspicion are rare, and even when they do appear it’s often not something you can realistically anticipate from the choice you’re making.
Mercifully, Midnight Caravan does allow you to save pretty consistently, so you rarely have to redo that much if you find that a choice had some unintended consequences. And I would highly recommend making use of said save function, because along with these unexpected outcomes you’re likely to run into technical issues as well. A choose your adventure game is the last place in the world I expect to get soft locked in, but every now and then the game will just fail to display the text that’s supposed to appear on screen and force you to quit out.
The writing itself does have a bit more going for it. Despite its title, the main story of Midnight Caravan actually has very little to do with running said caravan, and instead primarily revolves around the main character trying to track down Cassini and exact revenge. There is some good intrigue, and the surrounding cast of characters are pretty well put together. If nothing else, the story serves as enough motivation to keep pushing forward.
That said, a repeat playthrough quickly reveals that the “choose your adventure” description was exaggerating on the “choice” aspect. While there are some player choices that can impact side aspects of the story, like optional characters that join your caravan, the main narrative is pretty thoroughly set in stone, and your choices generally don’t impact how it plays out beyond occasionally penalizing your health for making a bad decision. I booted Midnight Caravan back up after beating it for the first time and tried making the exact opposite of the choices I had made during my initial playthrough, and every time I made a choice that would have theoretically diverted the story significantly, the game just came up with some excuse to barge in and prevent that choice from actually happening.
The writing also suffers substantially from spelling and grammatical errors. As Phoenix Wright fans can attest, nothing quite ruins a somber soliloquy like a typo or incorrect verb tense, and this game makes one of these missteps with seemingly every other text box. Even beyond these errors, the dialogue itself is also very weirdly written, with characters’ phrasing feeling unnatural and awkward at times. This is a script badly in need of some serious proofreading; many of these mistakes are so simplistic that Microsoft Word’s grammar check would have caught them.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of reasons to buy Midnight Caravan. The writing, undoubtedly the strength of the game, still has plenty of issues. Resource management is an unpredictable mechanic that Midnight Caravan doesn’t take advantage of to its fullest, and the technical issues are just the brussel sprout-flavored icing on top of the three week old carrot cake. There’s potential here for something interesting, but potential can only carry you so far... which is up until the point when you get softlocked and have to alt + tab the game.
VGChartz Verdict
3.5
Bad
This review is based on a copy of Midnight Caravan for the PC
