It’s December 1993 and you’re about to start your shift at Midnight Mart. You know this job is dangerous but you have to stay to keep up with your pets medical bills. As well as dealing with customers you will also have to deal with a new race of people called doppelgangers. Fail to spot one and you will end up facing the entity. And you might not survive to see the next shift…
Shift at Midnight is an online co-op retro horror game that is similar to No I’m not a Human and That’s not my neighbor. Like those games, you must identify who is a doppelganger and who is a human. I am reviewing it from a solo playthrough. It gets creepy, funny and strange at different points in the game. It keeps the player guessing if they got it right and at the end of some nights and you will be surprised how easy it is to let doppelgangers slip past.
I also like the graphics in the game as the old fashioned 3d graphics adds to the surrealism. The game does have a few jumpscares but doesn’t solely rely on this for it’s horror. It instead incorporates a creepy atmosphere and story events to keep the player hooked. But the overall health of your character and some bugs in the game do hold it back from being as scary as it could be.
What’s your favourite pet?
At the start of the game, you choose a pet to take care of from the animal sanctuary. The animals include: a dog, a puppy, a cat and a goose. You can name your pet which i think makes it more personal. I chose to name mine after my cat. The main story shows your pet getting sick. You then need to get enough money to pay for your pets medical bills or your pet might not make it.
How much money you earn depends on the stores revenue of that night and if you passed the quota. You get a tiny 10% of the stores revenue and only $10 if you passed the quota for that night. Surprisingly, there isn’t any financial penalty for serving doppelgangers but if you kill them you lose money. So the game asks the question what are you willing to do for your pets life?
Each customer is required to give you their ID which you scan to look them up on the computer. You can question the customer if you see something strange like if they are missing a limb or are supposed to be dead. If they’re a doppelganger you shoot them with your gun under the desk. If they’re human you serve them. It’s sometimes funny what doppelgangers can say to try and convince you. For instance, one doppelganger told me he took magic beans to make himself taller?
The store shop can be accessed on your computer for you to purchase things like a flamethrower or C4 Explosives. Normal things a store needs. There are upgrades for the backpack to increase inventory space and extra Hp upgrades avaliable. Decorations may also be purchased to increase customer satisfaction. If customers are more satisfied with cleanliness and stock they will buy more things. The store makes the game a lot easier and having access to a sledgehammer is essential.
Don’t let it replace you
If you served doppelgangers be ready for an assault as the entity will come for you. You are given a minute to prepare traps and board up doors before it arrives. There is also an arsenal of guns for you to access, more if you bought some from the store. Whilst the entity is scary and your first night i believe it could made more terrifying. The problem is that it takes a while for it to kill you on it’s own which makes it less threatening. The extra HP you can buy from the store makes this issue worse.
I started to tank the damage and repeatedly hit it with a sledgehammer. It started to feel a lot less threatening later in the game when you gain access to more weapons. I also encountered a bug where the entity wouldn’t go away after i attacked it. Luckily this didn’t happen again.
There are other creatures later in the game to help with this however. For instance, there is the shrieking doll which crawls around and lunges at you. The demented only moves when you can’t see it and is immune to damage when you can see it. Traps are the way to dela with it. Finally there is the marionette which will spawn if you aren’t quick enough to rewind the music box that appears near the entity. These three creatures keep the threat of letting doppelgangers through alive and are very unnerving. Especially the demented as you can only hear it’s footsteps quickly getting closer when you aren’t looking at it.
Later in the game, you will then have to fill up people’s cars with gas. This time to determine whether someone is a doppelganger you will have to search their car and look them up on the registration device. You can question the driver on different things you can find in the car. For example, I saw a note with a list of people who were playing at a football match. The driver claimed he was on his way back from a football game. I decided to look up the names of the people who were supposed to be playing in the game. They were all deceased with mutilation as the cause of death. This keeps the game interesting and forces you to really pay attention what people are saying.
At the end of each shift you receive a report telling you who was a doppelganger and who was human. You also get a report of how much money you earned. Some customers will always appear in story mode whilst others will appear randomly and on different nights. This makes the game less predictable and keeps it interesting.
Some equipment later in the game can reveal if someone is human. For example, the anomaly lens can see things the naked eye can’t. The emotiscope can also reveal if someone is feeling tired, happy or craving human flesh. Normal things a person feels.
There are three main endings which depends on if you have enough money to save your pet or not. Towards the end, you’ll realize a brutal truth. You won’t have enough money for your cats surgery if you don’t serve everyone. I only realized this as i got to the end of my first playthrough. I realized that because of my low pay i wouldn’t be able to save my pet. So i changed how i played and started serving anyone including doppelgangers in my second playthrough. This meant i had deal with entity but i did manage to get the true ending. I really like this element of the game as it forces you to change how you play.
Final Thoughts
Overall I really enjoyed Shift at Midnight. It keeps scares interesting by mixing jumpscares with a creepy atmosphere and creepy story events. It also changes the way you play later in the game and lets you roleplay as a detective. Trying to find anything wrong with what the person has said or if there is something wrong on the N.E.T database. But the entity isn’t as scary as it should be.
