Midnight Deluxe, my little chill game

Midnight Deluxe is an indie game developed by “Petite Games” that I bought on the eShop while it was on sale. I have to say that I spend a lot of time on the Sale part of the eShop. They allow me to discover a lot of games while saving some money.

When I set sight on Midnight Deluxe, I also bought 36 Fragments of Midnight also developed by “Petite Games”. It’s my “cube games” period! In short I bought games where the main character is a cute little cube. And Midnight Deluxe is one of them. It’s a little puzzle/arcade game in which you incarnate a little white cube that has to reach a ray of light.

Golf with a cube

That is what in my opinion describes the game best. And like with golf it’s a relaxing game. Well personally that’s how I play it.

The gameplay is simple, by maintaining the A button down then inclining the left stick, you give a direction and an impulsion more or less strong to the cube. By releasing the A button, the cube is then going to fly in the direction you will have chosen, leaving a beautiful sparkling blue trail behind it. I loved that, I find it relaxing.

The idea is to make it so that the little white cube goes to the luminous zone at the opposite of where it currently is. Of course, your path will be full of pitfalls and you will have to join the zone while avoiding the traps. A countdown will force you to optimise your path. The less action you do the higher your score will be: from one to three stars.

It’s a simple and efficient concept. Well, simple, but I struggled to get the hang of the amount of impulsion needed more than once. I had to redo some levels more than 10 times before managing to find the correct energy amount necessary. Then I am not that good, I have to confess it…

But in Midnight Deluxe, the aim isn’t in the gameplay but in the puzzles and most importantly the ambiance of the game in general.

Midnight Deluxe’s strong points

The game proposes about 100 levels that have a growing difficulty. As you go along, new traps will appear like toothed wheels or lasers but everything will stay in coherence with the game’s ambiance. The difficulty is raised with each new trap, but you will also have to be more precise in your moves: use the décor to bounce, choose your jumping angles better…

Each level offered me a new challenge, so I didn’t get bored. I did a few pauses on the levels that needed a rapidity in the decision process. Those levels are quite rare, but they are the ones that cause me the most troubles.

The game’s ambiance is another strong point. It is sober all along the game as well as the graphics. The levels, well, the platforms on which you evolve are black and stand out from the background made of an illustration. A little as if someone had drawn those platforms with ink on top of a picture. The illustrations change from a level to another but stay in the same general theme, that is to say a night landscape and without life: a house, a manor, a dead tree… Each landscape is only lit by the moon or a flash of light that seems to be in your cube. Those illustrations create a calm ambiance, even a little sad. It is accompanied by classical music that accentuate the calm of each scene. Those calm melodies push one to concentration, helping the solving process.

I really loved this ambiance that allowed me to relax while playing this game after a day of work. The game allowed me to let go and chill out before going to sleep. Even if some levels got to my head (the levels that ask for a quick decision).

Conclusion

Midnight Deluxe is truly a small game I really enjoy. Its calm and a little sad ambiance really pleased me, I let myself taken by the serenity that breathed out of the game. The approximate one hundred levels of the game offer a nice lifespan, even more if you want to do the best score possible in each level. In short, I quite liked this little chilling out game that I paid 1 or 2 euros thanks to a promotion and my gold points.