SENSEs: Midnight Review

I am fortunate enough to be heading to Tokyo, Japan in the near future, so my gaming diet will be mainly consisting of Yakuza, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Disaster Report games to help me navigate through the city on my lonesome. However, these games present Tokyo as either having gang members or paranormal entities on every street corner, or the epicentre of every single natural disaster respectively. So, admittedly, they may not be the best of choices.

Neither then is SENSEs: Midnight, but for slightly different reasons.

It allows you to explore the real-life Ikebukuro Park, future-set where some mysterious goings on have been happening. These would normally be reason enough to avoid the park on my travels, but SENSEs: Midnight also portrays it as an incredibly boring place to visit without any real redeeming features at all.

SENSEs: Midnight exists in the same world as Sense – A Cyberpunk Ghost Story, for better and worse. Whereas the former was a genre-bending narrative adventure, SENSEs: Midnight is an out and out survival horror game, channelling the genre’s golden age as much as possible.

In the not-so-distant future, you play as Uesugi Kaho, a college student and budding occult research enthusiast. After hearing the many rumours surrounding the Ikebukuro Walking Park, she decides to investigate it and livestream the whole thing. There is a strange door allegedly in the park known as The Midnight Door; it looks like it was once part of a since dilapidated building.

Upon finding and reaching the door, Kaho attempts to open it. But it is locked. However, soon after, the door opens on its own, and Kaho’s livestream begins to take a darker, more sinister turn as she attempts to simply survive the night. 

From the door appears an onryō, and those rumours about people going missing in the park suddenly feel very real to Kaho and those tuning in to the livestream.

SENSEs: Midnight attempts to pay homage to the survival horror classics featuring fixed cameras, tank controls and a very limited inventory. In reality though, these neither work well as throwbacks or modern interpretations.

There is also a more modern controller set-up, but this works even less well with the fixed cameras. You will be walking in one direction but due to the fixed cameras changing to another one – or worse, panning around a section in a jittery way – your thumbstick directions don’t change accordingly. What that means is that moving forward in one scene is the same to another, even if that is literally in the wrong direction. The controls will only correct themselves once you deviate, and you invariably end up running in circles. During the many, many chase sequences in SENSEs: Midnight, you can see where the frustration is.

There are safe areas, denoted by blue butterflies flying around. Manage to get to one of these during a chase sequence and there is a little mini-game to enjoy. Thankfully there are just about enough of these to utilise effectively.

Several pickups can also grant you invincibility for one attack. One particular enemy can kill Kaho in a single hit, so these do come in handy, especially when you quickly notice during the first chase sequence that this enemy is a lot quicker than Kaho, even whilst sprinting. To call it sprinting though is an insult; it is barely even a light jog.

As you progress, you will notice that whilst the park itself is rather small, a lot is packed in. There are shortcuts to unlock, collectibles to find and even a few side quests to undertake. These are explicitly labelled as side quests, but there is a main path that can be completed in under two hours if you know which items are key.

The collectibles come in the form of gacha coins. Find all 12 and you can unlock a revealing swimsuit for Kaho that is neither practical or warm enough for the park you find yourself in. Mind you, her base outfit isn’t exactly leaving much to the imagination either.

Of course, a horror game needs to be scary too. And SENSEs: Midnight is. To a degree. Attempts are made at jump scares but these miss the mark incredibly. There is an overall atmosphere to wandering round the park, and the feelings of never being safe is apparent. But the most effective scares come from photographing the ghosts. 

Kaho has a camera, but it works more conventionally than other camera-based horror games such as the Fatal Frame games. You will know you are near an apparition because the screen will go all fuzzy in a CRT kind of way. At this point you will need to whip out your camera and find what is lurking. Each ghost will appear the same way until you take the photo. Then, you will see the true horror of how they perished, and these instances can be creepy. There are plenty of these to find in the park too, but for the horror adverse, only six are needed for the associated achievements.

Even for survival horror veterans, SENSEs: Midnight is a tough game to enjoy. It certainly harks back to genre glory days, but poor controls and painfully slow gameplay will leave you yearning even more. It really is a toss up for which control scheme you find least annoying; neither are good and both will leave you frustrated as you get caught time and time again by the ghoulies. 

Whilst the story can engage during moments, the ending is lacking in anything substantial. SENSEs: Midnight is one for the survival horror diehards, and even then, only the OG diehards.