Nyctophobia

I'm always on the look for megastructure games and was happy to notice new one. Overall the gameplay experience was quite frustrating, consisting mainly of run for 5 seconds with flashlight, wait another 5 in pitch black for it to regen power again, repeat. The beacons and flares provided little help later on, but were quite limited for enjoyable usage. Took me one hour to beat, of which 30 minutes was probably me standing in darkness waiting for battery to power up so i could see again. Environment was really repetitive with the beacons you left behind being the only guiding elements.

The flashlight battery really ruins it. Otherwise I would recommend this.

I like the simple architecture of Nyctophobia (despite the often samey hallways repeat ad nauseum) and the basic premise of the game - however, boy, do I hate the torch. You try to ascent from the depth of a complex, with the floors being abandoned or delapidated, soaked in darkness and littered with the remains of a technologically advanced civilization. I went in expecting something along the lines of Pale Cocoon, a depressing realization of a faded world. The game's main mechanic is darkness. The screenshots do not do it justice, Nyctophobia's world really is pitch black. You can either use a rolling Xbox logo as a temporary source of light or place permanent beacons. Both items are limited in number. Your only other source of light is your untrusty torch, which burns through its power bank around every 5 seconds and requires some time to recharge. This would be fine if there were any other environmental light sources or reflections (think raytracing, the game uses Unreal Engine) bouncing around, ample sound queues guiding you towards your objectives, or a simulation of your eyes adjusting to the dark. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You are stuck standing around in silence while waiting for your torch to recharge, just to waddle a few steps and repeat the process, until you can complete whatever goal is required on a given floor. Simply stumbling through the dark is a bad idea because most corridors look the same or are aligned in cross-shapes, requiring you to plot a map of where you are and where you need to go. On one floor, there are also holes in the ground, so tread carefully. This becomes irritating later on when the game sends you on a fetch quest. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, Nyctophobia ends with a fade to black. Personally, I don't find stumbling around the dark for 1-1.5h very entertaining. The stakes are low, there is no lingering threat of stubbing your little toe on the edge of some block of concrete, so as the game drags on, its core mechanics quickly outlive their welcome. Even the beautiful geometry of every level is wasted on the darkness it is placed in. Therefore, if you seek an interesting brutalist or dystopian world to explore, I cannot recommend this title.

The megastructure stuff is cool, but most of the game is just walking through vents or corridors with very little indication as to your objective’s current location. These corridors are very monotonous and often rudimentarily constructed, using the filter as a sort of smokescreen to try and mask these shortcomings. I like that the flares are dynamic in the sense that you can kick them around in order to move the light, but the source dies out so quickly that most of the time it’s not even worth using them over the rechargeable flashlight. I think it would be cool if the beacon followed you around and maybe pointed things out/reminded you of your current objective, kinda like Navi or the Ghosts from Destiny. This could also solve the issue of there being no audio indication for new text appearing. The settings menu only has options for graphical presets, which I don’t understand the need for in a game as stylised as this, not to mention that my PC was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ screaming on ultra settings, although Task Manager didn’t actually show any sort of strenuous activity going on. This preset also had some kind of strange motion blur, so I assume it implements some combination of upscaling/raytracing, but I couldn’t say for sure. Ultimately, I have to agree with everyone else. The main draw of this game is the architecture, and yet you spend ninety percent of the game in pitch darkness. It just doesn’t work.