Stroll through The Midnight Walk and experience the Five Trials of Fire in this horror-claymation game full of mysteries and wonder. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying

The Midnight Walk Review Overview

What is The Midnight Walk?

The Midnight Walk is a horror-tale of The Burnt One as they go on the titular Midnight Walk alongside their Potboy companion to brave the darkness. They both must face the Five Trials of Fire where many peculiar characters have sought to use the power of fire for various purposes. Together, they’ll run, evade, hide, solve puzzles, and uncover mysteries in order to fully piece together the story of fire by the end of long Midnight Walk.

The Midnight Walk features:
　⚫︎　Simple story with a wealth of side content
　⚫︎　Unique scanned clay-modeled characters and environments, animated to mimic traditional claymation.
　⚫︎　Gothic art style and direction.
　⚫︎　Diverse voice cast embodying their various characters.
　⚫︎　Meticulous SFX design incorporated into the gameplay and environmental ambience.
　⚫︎　A VR-first game developed for the platform.

For more gameplay details, read everything we know about The Midnight Walk's gameplay and story.

PlayStation

Steam

The Midnight Walk Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Simple but Layered Storytelling Top-Notch Digital Claymation Masterful Use of Ambience and SFX Excellent and Convincing Voice Acting	Gameplay Design is Limited for VR Experiences Visibility is Poor at Times Due to Stylistic Choice Various Bugs Still Present

The Midnight Walk Overall - 90/100

The Midnight Walk fires in almost all cylinders flawlessly, where its art, sound, music, voice acting all round up a simple but captivating story. However, being a videogame, it has some lackluster gameplay elements that feel basic and tedious, though serviceable enough. Nevertheless, the other aspects still outweigh the cons and are able to provide a great gaming experience with a unique presentation seen so rarely in the gaming industry.

The Midnight Walk Story - 9/10

The overall narrative is deceptively simple on the surface level, but drastically improves when one simply knows where to look. Aside from the heartwarming and bittersweet tale, coupled with the excellent narration, scattered in each chapter are pieces of environmental storytelling and recordings. They act as a window to the past that fully flesh out the overarching saga, showing different POVs, tidbits of lore, and the voices that further add context. The story as it is solidly stands, but the aforementioned abundant side content, needs to be sought out instead of naturally told, and thus requires a bit of effort to fully experience.

The Midnight Walk Gameplay - 6/10

Being a game available both for default monitors as well as VR headsets, the gameplay is rather limited in what it can do, making it the game’s least successful aspect. The puzzles are simple and straightforward, and the quests are simply fetch "go here next," tasks. Finally, at times, it feels like the typical ‘on-the-rails’ experience in the VR games of old, where the player is merely placed on one spot to be amazed and awed by witnessing a grand spectacle unfold. It’s serviceable at its best, with whatever it can do to accommodate both flat screens and VR experiences in one, but there aren’t a lot of engaging gameplay elements, bar for some shining chase sequences and unique use of simple game mechanics.

The Midnight Walk Visuals - 10/10

The Midnight Walk’s main driving force is its absolutely amazing visuals made for the title; every frame a painting that can be paused to appear like a physical diorama in real life. The characters are able to exhibit so much charm through their meticulous modelling and claymation details, allowing them to express an abundance of emotion and personality. Meanwhile, the visual atmosphere for each area is purposeful and consistent with a direction and aesthetic. Though there are times that visibility is rather poor, it can be seen as a stylistic choice to force the any color and flames to be more pronounced, bringing more importance and emphasis in its role to the story.The Midnight Walk is a visual masterpiece where the art team deserves all the praise for their monumental achievement.

The Midnight Walk Audio - 10/10

Sonically, The Midnight Walk is a shining example of maximizing one’s senses for all aspects. It fully utilizes various sound effects throughout the environments to instill spine-chilling tones, as overlaid with hauntingly beautiful music that echoes throughout. Prominently, the voice cast deliver them from their hearts and their chest for their performances, embodying the various peculiar characters to make them feel lifelike.

The Midnight Walk Value for Money - 10/10

Valued at a humble $39.99, The Midnight Walk is more than worth the price it asks for. The amount of care and love poured into crafting the clay models, the music, the voice acting, and the solid story all make for a great experience whether you’re on a flat screen or playing with a VR headset. For a game that spans around 10-12 hours of content, it feels like more, as you’ll find yourself immersed within the world, never wanting to step out of The Midnight Walk.

The Midnight Walk Review: Nightmare Before Christmas: The Videogame

The Midnight Walk is a title that I’ve been anticipating for a long time, having fallen in love with the premise at first sight when it was revealed during the September 2024 State of Play. A first-person horror claymation game with a children’s storybook-like presentation is a niche genre that won’t be most gamers’ cup of tea, but just going by the concept and previews themselves should be enough to excite any fan of art, animation, and the claymation works of old and new.

Claymation, a sub-genre of stopmotion meaning "Clay Animation," has always been a deep-seated interest of mine since I was a child, watching the classic dark/gothic Henry Selick movies such as Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, but also having fun with Wallace and Gromit and the Shaun the Sheep spinoff as guilty pleasures. Recently, any form of stop-motion animation has been scarce, due to the gargantuan amount of time, commitment, and resources needed to pull it all off. In the past few years, only a scant few have dared venture into the field again, most notably esteemed horror director Guillermo Del Toro with his adaptation of Pinocchio, and a newly-released Wallace and Gromit sequel, A Vengeance Most Fowl. But those were in the form of film and television, where audiences merely had to sit down and watch. To adapt that style into an interactive video game would be an incredibly difficult task to perform. There have been other recent video games that incorporated the stop-motion style, such as South of Midnight and Judero, but they are of different genres and styles altogether.

However, as an avid fan of the horror claymation genre, I can safely say that The Midnight Walk triumphantly achieves it and delivers a hauntingly beautiful videogame that any fan of stop-motion, claymation, and/or storybook horror fans can enjoy.

It’s exceptional in all aspects to establish an immersive and fascinating experience for players, combining a solidly simple but layered storytelling narrative approach, fantastic and consistent visual direction, a haunting and chilling musical soundtrack, and a superb voice cast to to fully embody the zany characters that make up the entire story. However, the only diminishing aspect of the video game is in its gameplay elements itself, feeling somewhat simplistic and limited due to juggling the two aspects of being a traditional game and a VR experience at the same time.

Nevertheless, The Midnight Walk is a difficult feat to complete, and is a very welcome attempt in adapting stop-motion claymation into the world of video games. Now, I’ll be going into the very specifics of why.

This review is based on the Steam version on the PC, not on a VR headset.

Remarkable Claymation and Artistic Direction

Implementing claymation into a video game is by no means an easy job. The team lovingly crafted clay models of all characters and environments, then digitally scanned every single one to be inserted and manipulated within their game engine. Afterwards, they mimicked the classic claymation style of animating in twos – meaning that within a second, only 12 frames are shown – incorporating it to any and all moving parts within the game. Though there are a few subtle corners that were cut that didn’t make use of this method, they were never the most prominent and in the center of attention. This painstaking process and method requires an excessive amount of planning, direction, and labour to pull off, but in the end, The Midnight Walk succeeds in inducing a wonderful charming nostalgia inspired by the old, while still feeling new and modern. One notable example would be Potboy, the living companion fueled by coal and lives through fire. His numerous wonderful animations throughout the game provide a lot of charm, allowing him to express and exude so much personality, endearing him to players all around. Potboy is so adorable to order around, or even just observe as he explores areas on his own and interacts with the environment with his tiny little stature overflowing with curiosity.

Not only the clay models and stop-motion aspects, but the vis-dev direction is top-notch, providing a masterful ambience that fully immerses players into the world. There certainly are times where some areas look and feel to the point of almost zero visibility, but they stand to be stylistic choices that enable other certain colors to pop up and be more pronounced. The title of the game itself proclaims it to take place at an eternal midnight, so it makes sense for it to be shrouded in darkness at times, which makes seeking light all the more important. The post-processing effects, the film grain, and the overall ambience all work together to deliver a feast for the eyes.

However, one minor nitpick I myself have would be the small FOV, where at times I’ve found myself a bit nauseated with moving around. No doubt the hard-coded FOV is a by-product for being also a VR game, but an FOV slider for the PC would no doubt be a welcome addition for those with motion sickness or just in general for the option of choice.

Seemingly Simple and Straightforward Story, Until You Pay Attention

Being presented in the style of a children’s storybook, accompanied with the cartoonish characters and omniscient narrator, The Midnight Walk ostensibly appears as a simple, straightforward story fit for the general young audience, mixing together horrifying experiences, heartwarming tales, and bittersweet endings. At the start, it’s deceptive as such, setting up the stakes and the world as basic as can be. However, once you stop focusing only on what’s being told and you look around the environments while discovering the collectibles, the road of The Midnight Walk gradually widens, becoming a broad highway full of charm and despair.

Littered across the game are easter eggs in each area, hinting at the backstory for each chapter. The most important are the seashell recordings that contain the voice of the past, detailing the different POVs of characters players aren’t available to encounter and further fleshing out the narrative. The environmental storytelling of The Midnight Walk is purposeful and detailed, allowing keen-eyed observers and explorers to fully grasp and appreciate the crafted world in its entirety.

However, this method does have its drawbacks for those who don’t explore, and merely focus on the main objectives. As such, it’s very easy to go past the extras and only be exposed to the surface level of the experience.

Wearing Good Working Headphones is a Must

The game issues a warning at the start of the game, advising players to wear headphones for the full experience, as it makes use of binaural mechanics for its gameplay. I was skeptical at first, because being a horror game, they’re likely to use it to sound off jumpscares and the like. However, I couldn’t be more wrong, as the game does so, and more.

The Midnight Walk’s range is in full effect, being able to provide calming tones along a peaceful walk, to ring inquisitive chimes as players explore a new area, to invoke creepy, distant creaking and squelching from unsuspecting tree branches to unnerve, and terrifying crescendos that hit their heart-pounding peaks while hiding from a monster, as it discovers the player and starts a grand chase. Each environment is chock-full of subtle sound cues that makes the world feel teeming with life, which is the furthest one would like to believe when travelling through darkness. Thus, they’re able to fully immerse players so much only through sound.

Their use of the binaural audio is simplistic but gets the job done, allowing players to close their in-game eyes and merely use their sense of hearing to locate what they require. The sound effects used are varied and noticeable, but the overall gameplay loop of "close your eyes and follow the sound" becomes rather overused by the third time. A very very minor nitpick I would have is the gun, the Matchlock. Using it doesn’t ‘feel good,’ as its accompanying SFX sounds like wind scraping by, and not powerfully shooting a big ball of fire at all.

Last but not least and most notable of all, the voice cast knocks it out of the park, going all in with their performances to embody their unusual cartoony characters to make said peculiar characters feel convincing and alive. You see a living disembodied head and go, "Yeah, that’s really the voice and accent it would have, actually." You encounter a rotting reanimated corpse, and you’ll go "That is exactly how a corpse would talk." The narrator and all the various unusual characters all deliver in their performances, resulting in an auditory feast for the ears.

Gameplay Feels Basic and Stunted due to VR Limitations

One caveat to The Midnight Walk ‘succeeding’ as a video game is, a large part of its gameplay design is rather simplistic, where the usual "Go here to find this item and come back" encompassing a lot of the main story quest. There are a number of puzzles littered about, but they’re a little easy to solve that seems intended for a wide audience in terms of age. Due to this, it appears that more difficult or complex game mechanics could have been discarded or not advanced due to the potential younger audience, as well as to accommodate the limitations of action within Virtual Reality. It can easily be felt throughout, where a lot of the ‘gameplay’ forces players to stand still in one area and be beholden to a spectacle, only allowing them to rotate and make use of the 360 degrees capability of the VR headset. There’s one mechanic where the player approaches a balloon which plays cutscenes of being flown up and being transported to another area, and I instantly recognized it as the ‘VR moment’ intended for people to look around.

Gamebreaking Bugs are Still Present

I have unfortunately encountered a handful of bugs, where a couple halted my progress entirely until I was forced to restart again and again for it to be fixed. One was when I first entered Housy, and no prompts were visible around the house, locking me inside. When I finally relented and reloaded the game, I was immediately outside and skipped any events inside as if nothing happened, while Housy took to its feet and started walking once more.

Another would be inside the Molgrim’s lair, where after I had lit the first two candles in a clockwise direction, after telling Potboy to enter the pipe to be in reach for the third candle, the prompt to light it would disappear, and Potboy would remain entirely motionless. I let myself get caught by the Molgrim to reload the scenario in hopes that it was a bug. I retraced my steps, and to my surprise and worry, it occurred once more, locking me out of progress. On my third attempt, I decided to be risky and go for the third candle immediately at the start, and it suddenly worked! Now, thinking like a QA tester, I didn’t continue and let myself get caught and reload the scenario once more. I retraced my steps for the final time, lighting the first and second candles in quick succession, curious as to if the bug will occur again. To my shock, Potboy never stopped, but rather acted accordingly, lighting the third candle with ease as if nothing had happened.

These are the most major finds I had discovered, whereas the others I encountered are asset loading issues, models rapidly jerking away and resuming their place. Seeing as I was playing a review copy developed before release, I have high hopes that these issues will be resolved in time, as they are both immersion breaking, as well as gamebreaking.

Is The Midnight Walk Worth It?

Time to Get Your Steps In and Brave the Horrifying Highway

The Midnight Walk is an exceptional experience for the eyes and ears, with astounding graphics style, vis dev, SFX work, and voice acting that’s all rounded up by a simple but compelling tale of fire. However, it has its downsides with lackluster gameplay mechanics stunted due to the potential younger target audience, as well as juggling the limitations of playing in VR. That’s the only caveat in an otherwise exceptional game.

In the modern gaming landscape where every mainstream release has the same realistic graphics of the GTAs, God of Wars, Cyberpunks, Last of Us, Final Fantasies, and so and so, it’s a rare find for a game development studio to attempt such a risky process in producing real-life clay figures to be scanned, and then to animate them in stop-motion almost entirely. The development process is clearly and absolutely just for the love of the art, and of the game.

Being priced at a humble $39.99 with over 10-12 hours of main story gameplay, the value you’ll get out of your money with the meticulous love and craftsmanship of the developers palpably poured into this art of the game is more than enough to tip the scales and make it a must-buy.

Moodhood must be utmost commended for their efforts in putting together a wonderful experience such as The Midnight Walk.

PlayStation			Steam
$39.99			Wishlist only

The Midnight Walk FAQ

Is The Midnight Walk VR Only?

The Midnight Walk was developed with VR in mind, but can also be fully played on traditional monitors.

Does The Midnight Walk Use Real Clay?

The Midnight Walk’s developers constructed real physical clay models of the characters and environments, then later scanned them down to a T to accurately adapt them in game. Then, they purposely animated most of the character actions on twos to mimic traditional stop-motion animation.

Did Henry Selick or Tim Burton Work on The Midnight Walk?

Although the game is heavily influenced by titles under Henry Selick and perhaps Tim Burton, specifically the classic Nightmare Before Christmas film, the two have no ties to the developers of the game.

The Midnight Walk System Requirements

Game8 Reviews

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The Midnight Walk Product Information

Title	THE MIDNIGHT WALK
Release Date	May 8, 2025
Developer	Moonhood
Publisher	Fast Travel Games
Supported Platforms	PC(Steam), PlayStation 5
Genre	Horror, Adventure
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	ESRB T
Official Website	The Midnight Walk Official Website

Clark Jason Kong

Growing up playing all sorts of games, they love playing a little bit of everything, all of the time. Favorites include Counter-Strike, Life is Strange, Final Fantasy, Spiritfarer, and Devil May Cry.