Review: Midnight Deluxe (Switch)

by Michael Brandse

Like playing miniature golf at night with a flashlight.

Despite the deluxe in the title, Midnight Deluxe is unfortunately a rather lackluster game. But before I explain exactly why that is, let’s first talk a bit about the game itself. The game’s core gameplay revolves around shooting a cute looking character around the level in a golf like fashion. You hold the button while you determine the arc and the power of the shot with the analog stick, and like golf you have a par for each level. Depending on how well you do, you are rewarded with a number of stars. During the opening levels of the game, you are quickly introduced to the various types of obstacles, which will be used in increasingly different ways the further you get into the game.

Despite having a good difficulty curve and just enough gameplay elements to keep game-play from getting stale, there are too many things working against Midnight Deluxe to be able to call it a good game.

First of all, the visual style. When I first booted the game, I was rather looking forward to it. I like games that use interesting styles and the first impression of Midnight Deluxe did not disappoint. It felt a little bit like Limbo; a liberal use of dark colors with only the player avatar being bright white. Unfortunately, unlike Limbo where the visual style helped the narrative, in Midnight Deluxe it doesn’t really do anything. On the contrary, the style actually ends up working against the game. With the majority of the environment being pitch black, it is hard to make out areas in each level that have special functions, such as bouncy ground or even doors you have to open. While it never becomes really troublesome due to levels being generally short, it’s still a minor annoyance. Levels also don’t introduce any real visual variations; you will see the same background and foreground elements often enough that everything starts looking like each other. Visually, the game plays its cards too quickly and will leave the player without much to look forward to.

The game is also lacking in features. There’s no extra modes, no extra characters or even skins to play with. Just the 70 levels you see in the level select screen. Even the stars you can get for beating levels don’t do much more than looking nice in the level select screen as far as I know. I found myself losing interest in trying to get the best score in each level, and just tried to get to the end instead. With a general lack of real challenge in any of the levels, beating levels became rather boring.

All in all, Midnight Deluxe is not necessarily a bad game, but it also doesn’t have anything to make it really stand out, in the good and bad sense. With the Switch having a lot of spectacular indie titles already, that inability to stand out may actually be the worst thing for Midnight Deluxe. As it is, I find it rather hard to recommend.

Final Score 5.0

(Review code provided by the publisher)