Nocturnal

Big Trouble in Little Sister

Nocturnal is a short, linear action platformer about being a pyromaniac who comes home to find his sister playing with shadow. The entire realm is ruined, drenched in an oppressive black fog, and the only way to save the day is to set as much shit on fire as possible. Including his sister.

The central gimmick of the game is your ability to set your sword on fire, and then use it to set other things on fire. You accomplish this by striking lit torches, imbuing your sword for a short amount of time. While your sword is inflamed, you can then strike unlit torches and braziers to provide new permanent sources of fire, light up the vicinity, and refresh your constantly draining fire meter. Some sconces function as switches, opening doors or activating elevators once lit, and a lot of the navigation revolves around getting fire to everything that needs to be lit, complicated by waterfalls and magical shadow geysers that douse your sword.

Your fire buff is also crucial to the combat – attacks with a fiery sword set enemies alight, causing some damage over time, you can consume the enchantment to heal yourself on a small cooldown, and some enemy types can only be struck by flame. Later on, you gain a few additional offensive moves that can only be cast while buffed, like a massive swipe, thrown time bombs, and a channeled AoE explosion that stuns everything hit. In general, though, you’re mostly best off just doing a basic combo and then dodge rolling past enemies when they do their attack.

There’s a surprising amount of enemy variety considering how short Nocturnal is [more on that later] but none of it is particularly exciting. There are ranged enemies, whose projectiles you can deflect with attacks, beefy tanks who block your hits and even rolls with a shield, swooping fliers and casters, and even a couple minibosses, but nothing super memorable. The art style and slightly distant zoom level keep the enemy designs from being very distinct, the animations are readable enough for the difficulty level but would probably seem a bit abrupt if the game really challenged me, and a lot of it kind of gets washed out by all the swirling flames and smoke.

To be clear, the fire effects are pretty good, and with a little more effort and cleaner design would have helped carry the look pretty well. A ton of the incidental detail in the levels can be set alight, causing it to burn away dynamically – fluttering banners, ivy creeping up walls, corpses slumped on the floor. Sometimes it even fits in mechanically, with some bonus areas hidden behind tangled foliage or an elevator platform wrapped in vines that you need to hit with a fiery throwing knife to clear. Running along striking torches and progressively lighting up the world is satisfying and visually solid, and while the fire doesn’t really propagate realistically, the burning animations are well done. It reminded me a lot of the game Wildfire, which made more ambitious use of the fire propagation to augment more stealth-focused platforming.

The game is split up into around 30 stages, which you visit in a linear order. Some areas are very slightly more complicated than just a straightforward gauntlet, requiring some side tracks to open gates, activate elevators, and bring fire around obstacles like a harried Olympic torchbearer, but nothing too crazy or involved. There are even a few secrets scattered around these areas, mostly just nooks with some extra coins, but also a series of shrines, requiring small additional puzzles to access, which give you a little bit of text log backstory to read. Once you beat the game, you unlock stage select, which shows you which stages have shrines left to find, so that’s your main completion goal if you want to bother.

Killing enemies and breaking pots that are scattered throughout are how you get coins, and those coins are spent at checkpoints to unlock nodes on a small but sufficient skill tree. There are basic upgrades to give you a bit more health or extend your fire buff timer, then major perks that include all your special fire-enhanced moves and the ability to parry. Shockingly, parrying is a totally optional ability, and one that’s frankly kind of disappointing. The window is pretty tight, the reward is middling [enemies just ignite same as they would from getting hit with a buffed sword, though it happens even if you aren’t buffed] and a lot of enemies just have very short telegraphs in their animations before hitting you. In fact, it’s pretty much never really worth bothering, aside from a couple bosses where you’re forced to fight without a buff at all.

That brings me to my biggest gripe, which is the general lack of difficulty. Well, that’s not quite right. I’m not going to say it’s completely trivial, and I did cop a few deaths, but it’s lacking in the challenge and satisfaction in overcoming challenge that action platformers need to stay engaging, and it doesn’t really have much exploration to fall back on. Most combat encounters devolve into you simply dodging or hopping around, smacking enemies as many times as you can in the cooldown window between their own attacks, healing pretty freely, and only rarely forced to play conservatively, much less aggressively. The only encounters I found remotely engaging were the few that deprived you of fire sources, either by having each torch be single-use or igniting periodically on a cycle, and even then I found myself rarely stressed for health or time.

Oh, and the game has a few spots where you’re supposed to hop down to platforms beneath the bottom of the screen but there’s not enough visual information to know what you’re jumping towards and it’s really easy to miss and die. I don’t think these were intentional blind jumps so much as an oversight in the way the camera works and insufficient background design/playtesting.

One surprising positive was in its tone and the way it told its story. There are few NPCs, and only one who appears repeatedly, and even she only has a few lines to say at each encounter. I actually really liked those meetings – each one starts with you walking into a room where the female warrior is taking a break, and you can sit down across from her and catch your breath too, with the camera simply zooming in on the two of you momentarily resting with some thematic music that fades away whenever you decide to stand back up and carry on. There’s not a lot of plot, but it’s delivered competently enough to never get in the way or feel like a drag.

And it’s good that the game’s narrative doesn’t drag because it wouldn’t have a whole hell of a lot of time to do so anyway. The full game clocks in [for me] at a bit shy of two hours, with probably another 20 or so theoretically required for full completion, depending on how thorough you were in your initial run. Now, there is a speedrun mode, which is a cute feature, but I don’t see much appeal to it as a speedrun game anyway, and there’s no other boost to its replayability – no higher difficulty or anything like that. And dropping an action game that is, to be blunt, very plausibly completable within the standard Steam refund window for many players, is kind of ballsy, however you feel about short, tight experiences versus padded slogs.

Which is probably part of the reason Nocturnal frequently goes on deeeeep discount, which itself is why I picked it up even knowing it was very short and probably not a life-changer. But the reason I decided to finally play Nocturnal and whip out this post is because it’s currently not on sale – it’s free-to-own, almost certainly as a strategy to get some eyes on the series before the release of the sequel, and hopefully get people who otherwise might not bother to try out its demo. Like Janosik, I think this is a great idea for talented but utterly unknown indie developers, although in this case it’s a limited-time deal.

Even once this weekend’s over and you can’t simply download Nocturnal for free and then forget to ever play it, I do think it’s probably worth the couple bucks you can score it for on pretty much every sale that comes around, as long as you temper your expectations. It’s not much of game in and of itself, but it’s a respectable first taste of the upcoming sequel, which is a full Metroidvania with far more fleshed out combat, an expansive map, and hopefully a bit more than a couple of hours worth of mild distraction. Though, honestly, maybe just try the demo for Nocturnal 2 instead.

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Nocturnal can be purchased on Playstation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, GOG, and Steam.

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