Hello Puppets: Midnight Show | PC Review
Hello Puppets: Midnight Show, developed and published by Otherworld Interactive, is a stealth horror game. It is currently available exclusively on Windows PC.
The year is 1987 and you take on the role of Owen Gubberson, a master puppet maker and puppeteer who created a group of puppets known as Mortimer’s Handeemen, who are essentially The Muppets if you bought them off Wish. One fateful evening, Owen decides to try and cast a magic spell that brings his puppet creations to life; however, it all goes south very quickly as they animate, and it turns out that they are straight up evil and sadistic, with harsh plans in mind. Owen has one evening to reverse the spell that he so wrongfully cast and escape the Handeemen with his life intact.
Hello Puppets: Midnight Show is essentially a game of hide and seek. You hide and evil Mortimer seeks. Each level takes place in an area that belongs to a different puppet so you must sneak around the area and satisfy the puppet by solving puzzles. As a result, you receive little pieces to put on a board - once you have all the pieces on the board, you have completed the level. If you get caught by the puppet in question and die you’ll lose all the puzzle pieces that you have found unless you make the trip back to the board and bank them before you die.
I felt like Hello Puppets: Midnight Show was a well-presented game in so many ways. Firstly, the visuals were great, the designs of the puppets such as Mortimer were really cool, and the whole environment was really well fleshed out and felt really unique. Alongside the visuals, the sound design is great and creates so much tension and a really creepy atmosphere, as I was trying to navigate my way through the backstage section of the theatre-like building. Each character was so uniquely brought to life with the wonderful voice acting throughout. At some points the horrible ringleader, Mortimer, sounded like a gentle loving person and then he’d just suddenly switch into this evil maniac. All of the small details in this game really came together to become something great for me.
The puzzles are generally fairly simple to work out and didn’t really pose too much difficulty. This isn’t a criticism at all, because the game could have become incredibly frustrating with poor puzzling aspects. None of the puzzles are re-hashes of previously used ideas and each level, despite not necessarily demanding new things from you, would still be capable of catching you out. For example, the AI actually learns and adapts to your play style and learns from your actions. This was something that I really enjoyed in Alien Isolation so to see this return in other games is always a pleasure for me to experience, although it certainly increased the challenge for me massively because stealth isn’t really my thing.
I really enjoyed Hello Puppets: Midnight Show. It is not necessarily a perfect game, but there were so many redeeming factors making it so much fun. It is not particularly scary but provides equal parts fun and tension. Perhaps this is a good one for younger horror fans in the same way as Five Nights at Freddy’s and Hello Neighbour - I have a younger sibling who I just know would love this game. The game is really well designed in so many ways and ran pretty flawlessly for me throughout. I like to hope this isn’t the end for Hello Puppets because I see a really bright future with more sequels using similar concepts.
Lj’s Rating: 4 out of 5.
For more information on Hello Puppets: Midnight Show please use the following links...
Otherworld Interactive - Developer | Publisher | YouTube | Twitter | Website
Many thanks to Plan of Attack for the Review Key.
Hello Puppets: Midnight Show | Windows PC
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