Midnight Scenes: The Highway

Awesome little game for the point and click enthusiast but it is very short. Like ten minutes short. My only gripe is - considering the length - I think the asking price is too high. (It'd be better at a buck or so.) I really want to see a full length game from Octavi. Dudes got real talent.

The pixel art is nice, the atmosphere is creepy, the puzzles are straightforward and serviceable. I think it would have been a fine segment for a longer game. However, as it is, it really feels like they took an hour long horror short, clipped the first 15 minutes and made that the feature film. Considering the game's length, I expected a quick buildup to something really scary and/or clever like they have in some horror shorts. Instead, the buildup was relatively slow and the 'reveal', well... I won't spoil it for you so I'll just say that to me, it felt like act 1 in a somewhat longer horror movie where they later go into more details and really dig into the meat of things. My personal feeling is that this game should have been an extra freebie packaged with one of the developer's later games to show the progression of the developer's work rather than something that is sold separately. As far as I can tell from the 2 other games I played in the series so far, you can skip this game and go straight to the later games (which I enjoyed more) as there is no continuity with this game that I could discern. Then, if you really like the other games and want more, you can backtrack to this one, especially if there is a large discount on it.

Buy this if you: -appreciate spooky/eerie stuff like "Twilight Zone", "Eerie, Indiana" and "Kolchak, Night Stalker" -enjoy pixel art reminscent of the LucasArts golden age of adventures -do like classic adventures but have not much time to spend on gaming altogether -prefer eating one slice of very fine pizza instead of eating a whole okay pizza -are fine with reading a classic short story if there is no good new novel at hand -like visual novels altogether Avoid this if you: -look for a lengthy narrative with hours of gameplay -think that the "pixel art" production design of indie video games is overused these days -want hardcore-levels of horror

Short and creepy, with a simple and logical order to the character's actions. The story is told visually, so if you skip clicking on wanted posters and family photos, you may miss what's going on.