Claymation Dark Fantasy Adventure, The Midnight Walk, Out Now
Moonhood, a new indie studio built from veteran developers, has itself built a distinctive new game primarily out of clay. The Midnight Walk follows The Burnt One and Potboy on a quest to bring light back to a land plunged into eternal darkness, and it’s out now on PC and PS5, as well as in VR.
Players control The Burnt One, and as they navigate a world without light they can use Potboy’s flame as a tool and distraction. The Midnight Walk covers five chapters, and involves a mix of stealth and puzzle solving.
“Play as The Burnt One, a mysterious figure who rises from the ashes to uncover its purpose,” the developers said on an official game page. “Befriend a lantern creature named Potboy, whose flickering flame guides you through perilous landscapes. Together, navigate a treacherous highway, outsmart nightmarish monsters, and uncover the secrets behind the sun’s disappearance.”
A Tangible Sense of Place
The game’s distinctive look conjures up easy comparisons with Tim Burton, although there’s also a touch of Little Nightmares to the distorted bodies and angles of the characters and locations. The creepy art style is thanks to the fact that everything encountered in The Midnight Walk was handcrafted from clay and other physical materials, animated in stop motion, then 3D scanned.
“We do a lot of thrift shopping,” Olov Redman, Moonhood co-founder, said in an interview with Creative Bloq. “All these objects from our world are giant in this miniature world to get a sense of a world outside this world seeping in.”
Moonhood scanned around 700 objects into the game, which includes puppets used to relay world lore, as Klaus Lyngeled, the other founder of Moonhood, said.
“We actually film real puppet sets, puppeteer them and then make these short movies with them that explains the backstory. As you go through the world, you can explore these different movies and find out what really happened to the world.”
Moonhood’s Background
Based in Sweden, Moonhood is primarily made of developers who worked on games such as Lost in Random and Fe. Redman and Lyngeled previously worked together at another game studio, Zoink, which was taken over by Thunderful, a studio and publisher, in 2020.
Thunderful has taken over multiple game studios in recent years, including Germany-based Studio Fizbin, only to lay-off staff and close those studios down. Thunderful is the publisher of Fizbin’s final game, Reignbreaker, as well as a forthcoming new Lost in Random title.
