Nightfall

by Eric Eve profile

Espionage
2008

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Number of Reviews: 6
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Stubbornly going back into an evacuated city to find "her", October 26, 2020
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

Well, this was straight up my alley. Squarely in my comfortzone. Apparently I feel comfortable exploring the dimly lit streets of a gloomy abandoned city... (huh, what does this say about me, I guess...)

And exploring you must do. Since Nightfall is basically puzzleless, it's all about looking around and solving the Big Puzzle: Who is She?

While you search around the big, big map, some locations will trigger memories, which can be RECAPped to get a picture of this mysterious person you've actually half-known most of your life. Glimpses into her inner life, helping to make sense of what's happening this night.

The author has included some helpful commands to help navigate and keep your place in the story. (GO TO, REMEMBER, THINK). These are a great help, especially since the PC has a lot more knowledge of the geography than the player, and because it's easy to be unsure about what to do next in such a big city full of possibilities.

Writing and implementation are very good, good enough to have you wandering around Xing everything and forget about the time.

Yes, time matters in this game. You have to find her in a certain amount of time or ... Actually I don't know. I found her by 01.37am. I have no idea how much more time the game goes on for. (You can check the time limit in the help menu at the beginning of the game if you want.)

Depending on the route you took through the city, the locations and objects you examined, you get a different ending. (I got a "losing" one I think, but I liked it nonetheless.)

A game with great atmosphere, it deserves to be played/read attentively, best of all in one or two long stretches.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Slightly generic espionage work in an unnamed town against an unnamed enemy, June 30, 2019
by verityvirtue (London)
Related reviews: melancholic

Premise: You're one of the last people in the town. Everyone else has fled on the government's orders, on threat of an unknown Enemy (yes, capital E).

Nightfall is technically proficient, featuring several good examples of parser conveniences. The player can use the "GO TO" command to navigate the substantial map, and there is an impressive amount of content to explore.

I found the sheer number of memories available slightly overwhelming, even if most of them appear almost… trivial. Memories sparked by visiting certain places for the first time are indexed for future reference, though not all of the memories turn out to be important for progressing in the story.

The swelling inventory is disambiguated, but in a way that shows off the underlying skeleton of the parser format. Items of the same kind are colour-coded, like one might find in a point-and-click game (does anyone even remember those any more?!), whose artificiality becomes more obvious the more time one spends with non-parser or more modern, naturalistic games.

I found it hard to suspend disbelief starting from the premise. The town in Nightfall has the air of an unimportant town caught in the thrall of international politics, a little like Salisbury was to UK politics in 2018. The game remains infuriatingly vague about specifics, though, and do not offer too much information payoff for following a lead. If anything, the character motivations struck me as being a bit threadbare. The player character appears to be motivated mostly by an obsession with the unnamed female character, whose motivations we never understand - we cannot even infer it from the PC's memories of her - until the ending.

Nightfall is a large and mostly well-constructed game. The espionage setting will be familiar to denizens of the parser format, and despite everything I could still enjoy the game. Recommended.

(This review was based on the IFComp version on IFDB.)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Best Eric Eve game out there; real-life setting, huge map, good flow, August 22, 2015
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

This is my favorite Eric Eve game. It has all the things he does so well: gripping storyline, interesting but not-too-hard puzzles, incredible help system and 'go to' commands, massive map, huge inventory, and good gameplay flow.

It also has less of my least favorite aspect of his games, a focus on a male protagonist that has his pick of women. The woman definitely has the upper hand in this game.

You play a character in a city that is being evacuated due to a threat by an unknown Enemy. You stay behind to search for a woman you care for. An enormous relationship with this woman unfolds through flashbacks, which you can "REMEMBER" at any time.

I loved this game. Five stars. Some may not like it as much, and it's not in my top ten favorite,but it was a good show.

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
It was a dark and lonely night ..., November 26, 2008
by mazirian (Yarmouth, Maine)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2008, mystery

The premise of the game is that you have ignored a mandatory evacuation of your home town in order to remain behind and find a woman important to your past. Why she's important and why the town was evacuated are matters one is left to discover by collecting recollections strewn across a rather large map of the town. The game hits just the right tone of mystery in serving up descriptions of the deserted town and the memories that each location prompts. Technically, the game is just excellently crafted, and this was perhaps its strongest selling point for me in the end. Although there are a number of methods the designer employs to keep one from wandering aimlessly, none of these are so obvious that it overly interferes with one's immersion in the game. The story, however, suffers from a minor flaw: perhaps because the designer was unsure how many locations a player would investigate in the course of the game, he left a number of clues as to a certain character's personality that tend to pile up in a suspension-of-disbelief-crushing way if one investigates too thoroughly. That issue aside, this game fully kept my attention for the somewhat more than two hours that I played it.

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Deep and Approachable, November 24, 2008
by C.E.J. Pacian (England)

Perhaps the best compliment I could give to Nightfall is that playing it never once felt like work. The prose is concise, the puzzles (which are more like semi-realistic obstacles) are simple and straightforward, and there are a number of handy features to keep you on track.

Nightfall is primarily a game of exploration. The nameless main character has remained behind in an evacuated city to try and find his aloof and alluring female friend, and as he proceeds through the eerily deserted streets, bittersweet memories of his (until now, platonic) relationship with her come flooding back. Intriguing things are also afoot in the present, as you follow one step behind this mysterious woman, pondering her possible involvement with or against the strange powers at work in the city - and wondering just how much the PC is right to admire her.

Nightfall flows very easily. For the most part, I think this is simply the result of good decisions at the most basic levels of design and writing. But it helps that the author has also gone above and beyond the call of duty to add advanced features to help players get into the story. The player character can THINK about what he's learned and what options that knowledge points towards - and if you're stuck he can THINK HARDER (a nice phrase to type when you're lost, I feel) and come up with more explicit pointers. As a resident of the city, he can also GO TO locations - something that perhaps is more useful than it should be, given the realistically convoluted depiction of typical urban English geography.

Sometimes I think that IF authors forget that the vast potential for their games to accept varied and subtle commands, even those commands most commonly used by other games, can leave many players throwing up their arms in frustration - can turn away everyone not completely used to (or fond of) the crossword-narrative hybrid that some consider intrinsic to the medium. With Nightfall, I think that we have a nice example of an IF game that makes it easy to take part, while still providing the challenge of exploration and the involvement of decision-making.

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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Beware the Enemy, November 18, 2008

It should not surprise anyone that a game by Eric Eve is meticulously tested and player-friendly -- or that it allows a wide range of options in a spacious environment -- or that it features Biblical references and an elusive, unsettling female character.

I think Nightfall works better than Elysium Enigma, though: the atmosphere is more consistent, the puzzle elements more plausibly suited to their setting, the story is ultimately more thematically coherent and focused more deeply on personalities. The essential premise is hauntingly tied to things actually happening in the world, and the abandoned spaces feel plausibly chilling. Moreover, Eve takes full advantage of his medium. Implied time limits rush you along, built-in pathfinding allows you to navigate a city that the player character knows much better than the player, and a host of small design choices guide the story without making it feel too linear.

Nightfall is a competition game, but deserves more than two hours. The basic mystery of the game can be resolved in a single playing, but to understand the characters properly, and to get a happier ending, will probably take a second try, with more exploration. In a way, it is like the inverse of Varicella: where the player of Varicella must play many times in order to achieve the perfect Machiavellian plot, the player of Nightfall starts off in the middle of a situation planned by others, and may need to replay in order to escape it.

The game is not perfect. I was not always completely convinced by the motivations of the characters, who have to do some fairly extraordinary things. Nonetheless, it's a creepy and memorable work displaying superb IF craftsmanship.

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