Do you know what I like? The noir genre/aesthetic/whatever you want to call it. I love me some trenchcoats and .45s, I tell you what, stories with a melancholic cynicism and stylish flair befitting some hard-boiled edge. On a completely unrelated angle, I also like the concept of bureaucratic monster hunter organizations, of things mundane combatting things of fantasy like it’s just another day at the office. I also love old school survival horror with fixed camera angles, and wonky combat controls. Do you know how rare it is to have these crossover over with one another? Well, the noir and the monster hunter organizations do frequently, given Hellboy and R.I.P.D and similar things exist, but that survival horror game part definitely doesn’t mix in that often.
Nocturne is something I’d heard a few mentions of around the ol’ watercooler of the internet, usually in conversations about unfortunately forgotten games of the spooky and/or adventure variety, but never really thought about much or looked into, similar to me and the Tex Murphy series. It’s one I’d also seen a bit of negative talk of alongside people lamenting about it, which is a duality that is my prime gaming jam. I’m down for the games that can somehow simultaneously get Computer Gaming Worlds ‘Coaster of the Year’ award as its winner of 2000’s Hall of Shame but yet also net-positive reviews from other contemporary reviewers, and obtain cult classic status in the years since.
This is the first of my Halloween horror game reviews I’m going to be dropping here this month, in a series I’ve just now decided at this very second to dub ‘Octopus’s October Oooh Spooky Scary Games’, a name I will likely never say again after this. What better way to celebrate one of the best holidays than with some long-winded video game reviews?
Terminal Reality; A Microcosm of Gaming Culture
Nocturne is the creation of Terminal Reality, a company started in 1994 and one that went on to have a deceptively large impact on early 2000s gaming culture. It was founded by two people; Mark Randel, and Brett Combs. Randel was ex-Microsoft talent who started designing game software tech when he was only 15, which led to him becoming the lead programmer on 1993’s pretty groundbreaking Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 before he even graduated from university, which is a pretty wild start in the industry to say the least. Combs was a former manager of Mallard Software, a company that made a small bundle of DOS games in the early 90s largely themed around flight sim-adjacent titles and something called Fast Action Paq, which apparently was a 4 game collection of other companies titles.Ah, some classic DOS time-wasters.
The two of them banded together after leaving their respective employers to make their own company, Terminal Reality. Working out of Combs basement, they made their debut with ‘95’s Terminal Velocity as published by the just newly rebranded 3D Realms which is a piece of history in itself, which sold enough for them to rake in over a million dollar gross after one year of business and they just kept it rolling from there.
They ended up being part of a larger bit of gaming culture around 1998 when Terminal Reality became equal partners in the juggernaut entity that was Gathering of Developers (or GoDGames as they were often referred to as), a Texas-based publishing company founded almost entirely by disgruntled video game developers who were tired of putting up with the nonsense business side of the industry. The board of directors included Mike Wilson of Ion Storm fame (perhaps infamy), as well as some real big names from all over the industry; Harry Miller, future co-founder of Devolver Digital; Jim Bloom, marketing man from Terminal Reality; Doug Myres, beloved programmer whose credits range from KISS: Psycho Circus to Railroad Tycoon and Oni. At their launch, there were six major development studios who bought into the whole thing; Edge of Reality (Pitfall: The Lost Expedition), 3D Realms, PopTop Software (Railroad Tycoon), Ritual Entertainment (SiN), Terminal Reality of course, and goddamn Epic Games (Fortnite, as they so shamefully have decided to start erasing anything else from their history).
As partners in Gathering of Developers, Terminal Reality were a big part of its operations complete with Brett Combs even serving as vice-president. They were marketing themselves as the bohemian punks of the gaming industry, ambitious and creative upstarts who wanted to break the chains that the ‘suits’ above had long held developers down with, and publish only the truly best games they could uplift from such concerns as ‘lack of money’. It was a noble goal, and honestly without GoD taking those first steps into developer held publishing avenues we may not have had such modern institutions as Steam, or Epic Games publishing. What happened to Gathering of Developers? It’s a whole thing, but suffice to say there’s a reason I’m using ‘was’ and ‘were’ to refer to them here.
RIP, you trend-setting prince.
Gathering of Developers were the hot **** of the early 2000s, basically, and by extension Terminal Reality as large shareholders in it. Outside of publishing a bunch of stuff from Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K 2 to Age of Wonders to The Guy Game, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Max Payne and the first Kingdom Under Fire game, Gathering was also known for one very fascinating aspect of early 2000s gaming culture; their extravagant E3 parties. Trying to play up their bad boy image, they would hold a party event literally across the street from E3 in a parking lot, which became known as the ‘Promised Lot’ as detailed here in a charming video interview that aired on X-Play about the E3 1999 event; it was all booth babes, BBQ cook-outs and pole dancers and also some video games with concerts by Gene Simmons, apparently. Of note in that video is some early footage of a still unreleased Nocturne (curiously misspelt as Nocturn), and a still normal looking Adam Sessler at the end.
The event returned again the next year in 2000, and somewhere between the alleged Playboy model wrestling matches, people dressed like Vikings chugging beer, and Mike Wilson walking around in a schoolgirl outfit, a monitor played footage from a few games, but the most important one to this article is a finished and just released Nocturne.
One of the only confirmed shots I could find of the alleged model wrestling matches. This era of video games was something special, man. What the **** was this stuff?
Nocturne was a departure for Terminal Reality at the time, given that they were primarily known for monster truck games and flight shooter games like Fury3. In this fascinating Hardcore Gaming 101 interview about Terminal Reality’s horror games as a whole, developers Jeff Mills and Joe Wampole Jing lay down a lot of Nocturne development history. Highlights include that it was the brainchild of Mark Randel and Terminal Reality’s first employee Drew Haworth to show off Randel’s hot new lighting focused graphical engine, a major inspiration was The Shadow pulp novel character which will become very obvious when we see the player character, and the fact that there were a lot of characters they had to cut out of the game pre-release, one of which was intended as a female player character named Gabriella Augustini who still has a single name drop mention in the game manual that didn’t get removed.
Don’t worry about that whole ‘Teddy Roosevelt killed a werewolf’ thing, we’ll get there.
Mark Randel seemed to be a bit of a wunderkind when it came to making engines, and it shows in most of their games, Nocturne included as we’ll come to find out in just a few paragraphs. They haven’t developed the most amount of games, but their standout titles really made an impact; a first time developer making over a mil within their first year of business like they did with Terminal Velocity I think commands some respect. What else have they done? Well, uh, Kinect Star Wars. But also 2009’s Ghostbusters! Everyone needs a pay cheque to keep the lights on from time to time, no shaming here.
And with that juicy history lesson finished, let’s get into Nocturne.
Nocturne; Just Another Day At the Spooky Monster Office
Let’s get this out of the way; the greatest thing about Nocturne is its concept, and I ****ing love it. This game has such a killer set-up and universe going on, all centered around bureaucratic paranormal combat in the 1930’s.In Nocturne, you play as a man known only as The Stranger, a trench-coated noir protagonist and field operative of the government's supernatural investigation group called Spookhouse, whose gruffness is matched only by his complete and utter hatred of anything even vaguely resembling a spooky monster. He hates spooky monsters, which is great as the game takes place in a universe where all of them are seemingly real. He hates monsters so much so that he apparently was involved in a previous mission where they exterminated all werewolves in Germany. That’s dedication, man, goddamn. His hatred of spooky ghouls and ghasts is matched only by his pulp style, and he in fact does look straight out of a Shadow-adjacent dimestore novel.
Spookhouse was founded by President Teddy Roosevelt after he discovered the existence of spooky creatures when he killed a werewolf while fighting in the Spanish-American War. I can entirely buy ol’ T.R taking down a werewolf. Spookhouse serves as both sword and shield, investigating potential spooky threats to determine if they need to then kill it, which they seem to frequently do going off the events of this game. There are other agents of Spookhouse beside The Stranger that you will become acquainted with as you go through the missions, such as Scat Dazzle, the voodoo spirit possessed jazz musician, the literal demon Moloch, or the female half-vampire Svetlana who wields bladed tonfas while wearing a unbelievably skin tight leather ensemble. Wait, where have I seen that last one before, in another game from Terminal Reality even…
Nocturne can produce mind-boggling effects.
There are four lengthy missions to tackle in this game, presented as individual cases with a different style of horror and with a different threat with little continuity between them, as well as time skips between them as well. This goes a long way to adding a vibe to this game to me; it really feels like each of the cases are just another day at the office for everyone. They clock in, kill a powerful vampire lord in his castle, then clock out and go home, never staying to see the after effects of their work or even really seeming to care much. There’s a great moment in the second case where you encounter an ‘elder god’ of Lovecraft bent, and you and your partner just shrug their shoulders and leave it alone at the end; you dealt with the zombies, an elder being is above your pay grade. Spookhouse will send a containment team or something, time to go home until the next gig in a year or so. There’s this other great moment that sums this up really well; in one of the missions you find your partner dead in a church, and The Stranger reacts by practically rolling his eyes, asking the priest for some rum before telling him casually to look away from the blasphemy he’s about to do, then performs a ritual to resurrect his partner without even batting an eye. This is just an average Tuesday, no need to make a big dramatic deal out of it.
The Stranger comes off as a trope at first, his abrasive gruffness seemingly one-note, but I found him to be a character with some good characterization if you look underneath the surface a little bit. He’s singleminded in his complete disdain for anything that goes bump in the night, but yet he works alongside some in order to do work in Spookhouse. He plays up his resistance to that for sure, with a highlight being the first mission briefing where he actually pouts like a child in his chair when he finds out he’s partnered with dhampir Svetlana, but in the end he works well with her and even defends her at one point in the mission…after he calls her a ‘crazy *****’. He’s got some sass, for sure.
The rest of the characters are similarly well done in their own simple ways, or at the very least are an interesting enough concept to be memorable for the ones who only appear in the two or three times you’re let loose in Spookhouse HQ. My personal favourite picks are the former gangster turned Frankenstein monster ‘Icepick’ Gasparro, and Scat Dazzle. He’s a Southern gentleman houngun wearing an all white three-piece suit and is possessed by Baron Samedi; how is that not cool? Do you not like fun?
It’s a bloody business, being a Spookhouse agent. But business is good.
The game plays like a standard horror game of this era, with 3D character models against pre-rendered backgrounds, tank controls and fixed camera angles. It adds in some twists to differentiate itself from other games, however. You can move and shoot at the same time in Nocturne, though you still have to holster and unholster your weapons with a dedicated button first before you can fire, and The Stranger autoaims his weapons automatically at the closest enemies. There’s no reloading at all involved here; The Stranger is just that good, feeding bullets directly from his coat into his guns with the sheer power of his aura. There’s even a dedicated jump button which is definitely something I’ve never seen in another game of this type. Weapons also can have different ammo types you can switch between, like the obligatory silver bullets and whatever ‘aqua vampiris’ bullets are, effective against some of the different enemies you’ll find yourself against. There’s also melee weapons to swing around that mostly feel great, such as a woodsman's ax and a bladed holy relic perfect for performing open heart surgery on any vampire brides you find in their spooky castles.
These spooky brides, right here. They tend to disappear into mist and whisper terrible truths into your ears. Women, am I right?
The weirdest and most interesting thing about the gameplay is the first-person night vision mode. By hitting its keybind, you go into a 3D modeled first person view, complete with The Strangers guns moving around on the sides of the screen. It’s maybe just a little unwieldy, and I never really had to use it for anything, but it’s some technical wizardry that I can respect. It is actually a 3D environment and seemingly it works anywhere, so they must be somehow storing a different map and instantly loading it when you activate it given that the backgrounds in regular gameplay are entirely 2D images. Pretty spooky, Terminal Reality.
Interestingly enough, this game was compared to Resident Evil very frequently in previews of its time, but it’s not really a survival horror game. The puzzles aren’t as intricate, being limited mostly to finding the right keys and the only real ‘logic’ puzzles are in the last mission, and even then they’re pretty mild and just come down to trial and error. There’s also no inventory system to manage here, which I think is one of the most important parts of a survival horror game; kinda part of the whole ‘survival’ side of the name, to me. You find so much ****ing ammo in this game that I never had much of an issue with having to conserve it, other than maybe a few spots in the third mission set in Chicago; I was often walking around with about 400ish loose pistol bullets clinking around in my trenchcoat, and that's just the regular bullets. Nocturne instead is more of a straight up action-horror game, maybe even a bit of an adventure game, for lack of a better word, given how much time you spend in Nocturne exploring around various spooky locales. You got your dreary dustbowl Texan town, a spooky graveyard of adorable skeletons and imps, the murder-mansion of a lunatic, a Gothic vampire castle, a train as every late 90s action game needs, and you even cross paths with some pulpy trope gangsters monsters in a speak-easy. If that doesn't sound fun, I don't know what to tell you.
This room with its pronounced different floor panels and a smoldering body in the corner seems a little ominous…
Is Nocturne a really spooky game? Depends on what you're definition of horror is. It's likely never going to make you jump out of your chair of choice or anything like that through some immediate spook, and it's more 'horror' in terms of its subject matter and sense of atmosphere. The lightning engine and level designs builds up a feeling of dark beauty over having jump scares of something more direct like Resident Evil. It's more comparable to Silent Hill to me, outside of that games famous psychological bent, focused more on a spooky mood than having a zombie break through a window a few times. There's also a very present schlocky and pulpy 'camp' element at play here which I greatly appreciate here; I mean you fight Al Capone's Frankenstein mobster army in the third mission. If that's not camp, I don't know what is. It entirely tracks given Terminal Reality's stated inspiration of old horror comics and specifically X-Files and The Shadow pulp, and it's pulled off here really well and has a great sense of fun to the horror concepts.
Speaking of fun, is Nocturne fun outside of its great set-up? Mostly. It's not a bad playing game by any means, and anyone who says so I think needs to play something like Countdown: Vampires to see a truly bad tank control action game.
Enemies aren't overly bullet spongy to the point of frustration, and given most enemy types have particular weaknesses to a given weapon or ammo they never really felt unmanageable. Being able to move and shoot at the same time also helps, and The Stranger luckily can really book it so you’re able to get some decent distance from enemies by turning and running if needed. The enemy count can get pretty high sometimes, but being able to shoot two separate targets at once with your always available pistols also makes this part fairly manageable. It’s well designed on the gameplay front I think, and if anyone says it isn’t, again, go play something like Deep Fear or Countdown: Vampires; Nocturne is in no way on the same level as those. The one complaint I have with the combat is that The Strangers autoaim is a bit of a temperamental creature, and sometimes doesn’t snap onto targets as accurately and quickly as it should, especially if they’re at a different elevation level than you are. It’s not unworkable, but is something you have to learn to wrestle with from time to time.
The dreaded platforming sections do appear pretty commonly, and given the tank controls and generally unwieldy jumping ability of The Stranger it's a little rough at times. Again, it’s not unplayably rough, but awkward none-the-less; it’s likely the weakest part of the actual gameplay, and mostly for the camera angles making the jumps harder than they actually are. There’s a few specific jumps here that are very nasty, but with the ability to quicksave I was able to figure them out in a pretty respectable amount of time. Nocturne is something you should absolutely be save-scumming in by the way, and feeling no shame about it; goddamn there's some cheap deaths in this game, usually somehow involving The Stranger falling to his death in some form of pitfall trap or the fact that you walked off a ledge you didn't realize was a ledge.
This brings us the biggest complaint I think I have of Nocturne; the camera angles are often not the best. They tend to prioritize cinematic angles which look great in screenshots, but often at the expense of showing you important things, such as where a ledge is or how long the gap you’re trying to jump over actually is, or sometimes where items are or something you’re supposed to interact with in the environment. It's also inconsistent when exactly the camera will switch angles when you move offscreen. Sometimes it happens earlier than you expect, sometimes the angle switches way too late where you're already in the room or whatever you're walking into before you can even see where you're going. It got a little frustrating at times, to say the least, and often a little jarring.
This last point isn't a complaint as it's not really the developers fault, but this game is a ****ing hassle and a half to get to run correctly on modern hardware, let me tell you. The fine folks at the Collection Chamber have a mostly ready-to-go package, but there's still a whole bunch of troubleshooting I had to do and issues I encountered with it. Characters often walk around during cutscenes, with progression triggers based on them reaching certain spots. For some reason, their pathfinding seems to be really messed up in a lot of the cutscenes, often with them walking into walls and circling spots two or three times before finally reaching their destination. Luckily skipping cutscenes manually places actors in their rightful spot, but it does mean you’re likely going to have to reload if they get stuck and you want to see the cutscene. I got stuck only a few times inside ladders I was trying to climb, or once or twice on a piece of scenery. There’s also some unfortunate lightning flickering on textures likely due to issues with video rendering, and occasionally shadows would render as solid impenetrable black which was luckily fixed by reloading. I’m pretty sure most of these issues are from running this on anything above WindowsXP.
There’s some serious lighting tech working behind the scenes in Nocturne. Keep in mind this was 1999.
It’s unfortunate as this game is absolutely beautiful, as it should be given how utterly punishing its tech requirements were for its time. Models are stellar for 1999, there's some real-time cloth physics on The Strangers coat as it billows behind him as well as in background objects, and yeah, Mark Rondel’s lightning engine here is exceptional. Things cast dynamic shadows and bend light, The Stranger's laser pointers on his pistols and flashlight actually have a great looking diffusion and bloom effect if you look at them really close. The lightning is at the core of Nocturne’s visual style, and it's something I highly recommend you play in the dark as it's a very oooh spooky darkness game to contrast the lighting. So dark in fact there's dozens of screenshots I wanted to use that unfortunately came out far too dark to put in, but that I will confirm looked sick. It’s obvious looking through Terminal Reality’s catalogue at its major releases that they were some great technical powerhouses of their respective eras. The engine used here was fittingly referred to as the ‘Nocturne engine’, imagine that, and was also used by them for their follow up Blair Witch Part One: Rustin Parr. Didn’t know they made a Blair Witch game? Well, now you do.
The game was reviewed well upon release, outside of Computer Gaming World as I said earlier with its ‘Coaster of the Year’ award which is absolutely ****ing ludicrous to me, and it was a common visual benchmark for a bit of time going forward. Why didn’t it ever get a sequel? Well believe it or not their previously mentioned Blair Witch game did continue the Spookhouse antics with a sort of concurrent storyline given Nocturne’s time jumps, with the main character of that game being the genius inventor lady of Spookhouse and there’s even an extended section where you get to hang out with my newest favourite trench coat aficionado, The Stranger.
But, there was never an official sequel, and it mainly comes down to the earlier foreshadowed fall of Gathering of Developers; by the time Terminal Reality had a playable prototype of Nocturne 2 and pitched it to the publisher, they were on their last days and had to pass on it. Terminal Reality did however make what is almost an unofficial sequel under a different publisher; BloodRayne. Rayne was originally supposed to be Svetlana from Nocturne, which entirely makes sense given they’re practically the same ****ing character other than some red hair dye. Rayne also serves a monster hunter organization, in her case the Brimstone Society, and the stated point of all of this was to be a ‘safe’ backdoor sequel to Nocturne in all but name as they didn’t want to actually give another company access to their original IP they were so protective of, which I can entirely respect. The only drawback of course is that the series entirely died having never seen a real continuation, dying after taking such strong first steps into the gaming world.
What do I think of BloodRayne? Well, that’s something for another day…
It’s everyone’s favourite Blair Witch protagonist, Doc Holliday from Nocturne!
In the end, I'd say your enjoyment of Nocturne once again comes down to how much jank you’re willing to put up with in your video game experiences; I liked the game if you can’t tell, but I can see why someone not as invested in the concept may find it either frustrating or not very riveting compared to other horror games. Nothing in it I would say is gamebreaking, save for the occasional character getting stuck on a wall in a cutscene, and it’s not such a rough experience that I think it deserves a low score. Save often, laugh when The Stranger falls off a staircase and just eats **** and dies like I did, then reload and you’ll be fine; it’s nothing any worse than any of the other games of its time. It’s ultimately, to me, the strong world built here that carries this game into the ‘must-play’ category. Goddamn, did I thoroughly enjoy every charmingly gruff line The Stranger says, or the really cool and exciting mission set-ups, and the concept itself of Spookhouse, that was just begging to be followed up on and expanded. For gods sake, the game ends on a massive twist cliff-hanger, and one that has no conclusion. I have joined the fanbase of this game in saying “come on, Terminal Reality; give us another ****ing Nocturne, damn you!”
Until next time, and happy Halloween.
Pros
- + Great worldbuilding and concept.
- + Full of moody atmosphere and exceptional lighting tech.
- + Varied missions, with each offering something new in terms of spookiness.
Cons
- - Fairly boilerplate gameplay.
- - Inconsistent fixed camera angles that often make things harder than they should be.
- - Some questionable platforming.
8
out of 10
Overall
Nocture is a fantastic game of atmospheric lightning, great alternate-history worldbuilding, and some real concentrated pulpy-noir aura from The Stranger. It's strengths greatly outweigh its negatives, and it's something I entirely recommend. Give us a proper sequel already, Terminal Reality.
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