Midnight Murder Club Review: A Shot in the Dark

It seems like every few months a new multiplayer shooter comes along. More often than not they’re unremarkable carbon copies of each other. It too often feels like studios are scared of anything new or novel, content to simply ride the current trends and lose themselves in a sea of competitors. Midnight Murder Club, at least, does something different. Taking cues from the likes of Agatha Christie, Ready or Not, or Cluedo, this game is a breath of fresh air in an increasingly crowded genre.

The basic idea is that you and a group of friends are a part of the Midnight Murder Club — a secret society that gathers for a high-stakes game of Murder in the Dark. And it is, literally, murder in the dark. Without your flashlight, the screen is pitch black — not just the scenery, but the UI. You’ll need to balance between the need for stealth (your flashlight will give your location away, and you can track your opponents this way, even with your own turned off) with your need to see. Need to know your ammo count? Where the door is? The objective? Be prepared to turn on your flashlight and get shot in the head three seconds later.

The scenery is gorgeous. It may not have the graphical fidelity of something like Ghost of Tsushima or Silent Hill 2, but everything feels intricate and purposeful. The lighting effects are gorgeous, which is always great, especially in a game with such a heavy emphasis on it. The sound is also a high point. There isn’t much in the way of background music — instead, it’s mostly ambient noise. A song playing on the radio, gunshots in the distance, creaky floorboards, echoing footsteps. It brings a sense of realism to the game.

There are also a few different game modes available. Outside of the standard Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, there’s the capture-the-flag-esque Headhunters, the burglary-focused Thief in the Night, and Wildcards, which lets players shake up the game by choosing which rules to implement. There’s also Graveyard Shift, my favorite game mode: playing either solo or as a team of two, you’ll need to survive against AI enemies while completing rituals to lift a curse put on the manor. For each ritual completed, you’ll earn both a blessing and a curse. These vary from extending your knife into a sword to narrowing your flashlight beam. All of this keeps gameplay fresh, even in the game’s late stages.

Is the game fun? Yes! But that doesn’t mean there aren’t struggles. It’s certainly different, but different games fail all the time. The niche presentation might not do quite enough to attract as many new players as the developers might be hoping for.

There wasn’t much in the way of onboarding, or even narrative, the latter of which I think could have gone a long way here, given the setting. I was immediately thrust into lobby after lobby with players who could hit me in the dark the moment I stepped into a room with the lights off. Ranked play or tutorials could have gone a long way to ease new players into the game. As it is, I always felt like I was playing catch-up with people far above my level.

While your teammates can revive you, the fact that you can’t shoot in this state leaves you vulnerable. Often, it made more sense to let my teammates bleed out and revive elsewhere, rather than walk into an ambush. You can play the game solo, but outside the aforementioned Graveyard Shift, only Wildcards lets you play with bots. As such, people with less experience in the genre might struggle to pick up the different game modes. To an extent, this does incentivize playing with your friends, but this isn’t always possible. I did have the option to invite others to play the game for free, but strangely, this didn’t include crossplay.

The audio is great, but the option to scramble non-friends in the lobby is on by default, and it’s distracting. It was useful to track my enemies, but at times it felt like I was shooting at Qbert. Some of the more ‘out there’ noises work well, but this one took me out of the game.

The game could also improve with more opportunities to interact with the environment. One item lets you set up fake chandeliers to drop on your enemies, but the option to lay traps and tamper with the setting more organically could have upped the chaos. Finally, the game has a serious lack of customization options. You can’t even pick which avatar you want in a match. This is purely a cosmetic issue, but given the quirky premise, it’s a strange omission.

Midnight Murder Club is fun, if flawed, with all the makings of a cult hit, but a live service game needs to be more than culty. It needs to give people a reason to keep coming back, which is where it might struggle. Some quality of life improvements and further updates could see it become an enduring hit, but just like so many games, longevity might be an issue in the long run.