Subway Midnight Review

In my time living in a metropolitan area, the greatest melting pot of society I’ve come to realise is the train carriage. If you take a peek up from whatever Zucc is feeding you (hopefully this article), you’ll find a strange assortment of characters – business cucks, frontline workers (bless their souls) and naïve students waiting to become business cucks or frontline workers. On the flip side, when the lights go out and the underbelly is exposed, the real eccentric personalities come out to play.

Much like a night-time train through scary suburbs, Subway Midnight taps into the bizarreness of this crucible. This indie horror-puzzle game, positioning itself as a surrealist’s walk through the eccentricity of the personalities that inhabit the carriages. But are these people someone you’d have a chat with or ones you only dare to observe from the corner of your eye?

More like Pic-Ass-oh!

Subway Midnight’s story is immediately intriguing from the get go. The bulk of the story has you running through the world’s longest train from a sinister aberration, all while helping a series of ghosts overcome their personal quarrels. Each section of the train embodies the personality of the ghosts and with it comes the majority of the driving force of Subway Midnight – experiencing the back-to-back oddities that each carriage contains.

It’s by and large a wholesome story, wrapped in a horror game. It’s one that forgoes using dialogue, speech or text, as Subway Midnight leans heavily on the showing rather than the telling. It honestly took me halfway through my second run before I actually realised what was happening, and what I was meant to do. I always appreciate games that take this route of storytelling, a sort of blank canvas of a narrative; it guides you to its ideas while leaving a lot of the particulars nebulous enough to stoke thought and conversation around their meaning. To me, it’s a story about the small passions, joys and things that we can’t live without. Whether that be the applause of an audience, a relationship with a sibling, or a ridiculous amount of amiibo-looking figurines (with the latter being the most relatable).

With all that said, the act of actually playing and interfacing with Subway Midnight stands in almost direct contrast with the stunning experiential quality of its unique train cars. In essence, you can only do two things: move or interact with specific objects. A five-button game, you’ll have one hand free to bite your nails or stroke your chin in confusion. The moment-to-moment puzzles are staggering in their variety, as most carts also try to adopt a different conundrum for you to overcome. Its strength lies in its surrealist affectation allowing for pretty much any idea in terms of puzzle design to be deployed in an engaging way.

Marvel fans when quip no.100000000 is engineered into a scene by a committee

It’s worth noting that Subway Midnight has replayability baked into its design too. You will more than likely blunder into the bad ending more than once simply because there’s some level of obscurity in the solutions required to please the ghosts. The weakness that accompanies the aforementioned strength is that the act of replaying through these sequences with such minimal level of interaction or options available to the player eventually mires the gameplay in process rather than an experience. Colin’s Game, a Nintendo64-style Gone Home-esque experience within the game, is the culmination of both strength and weakness. It’s atmospheric, frightful, aesthetically nostalgic but my goodness is it long. On replay, on the whole, once you know the scares, there really isn’t much to latch onto beyond aesthetic appreciation. Thankfully, once you’ve helped the ghosts move on the game skips you through to the next section, alleviating a little bit of the woe of meandering through the same carriages.

Now, there is a meme of indie games all affecting sad-lost-walking child vibes, which is valid here, but I think looking beyond that stereotype to see the impressive amount of tonal shifting that’s executed brilliantly should be considered. After all, Subway Midnight presents itself as a horror game, and one with some very respectable jump scares, mind you. Respectable because of the true unpredictability of what lies ahead, and the creation of a terrific feeling of impending fear, an endless ebb and flow between comfort and extreme discomfort.

One carriage may be an artist’s depiction of a serene waterfall, surrounded by collectable flowers, but the next might be a grotesque, squelching, blood-filled organ that screams and squeals when you move through it. These insane concepts, variety of tones, and emotional states that Subway Midnight is able to swap between effortlessly is without a doubt its most sublime quality. With all these moving parts, shifting art styles and games within games, one would expect something to give. On the contrary, Subway Midnight is a seamless journey. It boots, goes and doesn’t stop until you quit. Whether that be from fear, frustration or reaching a finale.

Hmm, it appears I’ve made it to the murder carriage

Final Thoughts

Subway Midnight finds itself caught between a well realised idea of using surrealist methods to instil horror, and maintaining that horror over several playthroughs. The puzzling train carriages project an impressive spectrum of emotion that’s bewildering in an absolutely positive way. Unfortunately, it’s when you have to retread familiar ground in seeking a better ending than the beauty, horror and once surprising abstraction of them dematerialise. Don’t let that detract you though, as on reflection its short length and price of admission more than make up for the negatives. This is a weird little train ride, full of strange little experiences that are provocative and unexpected. Kind of like the naked man with the weird little [censored] I see every day when I get the train to work.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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