The Midnight Walk is a new venture from some of the people who brought you Lost in Random. Depicted in a claymation art style, this dark foray sees you embarking on a hike up a mountain in the middle of the night with a little clay creature with a pot for a head. Featuring a dark and mysterious world where everything around you is in stop motion, this debut from MoonHood is exactly what it looks like on paper and what you’ve perhaps summised in its trailers: more of an artpiece and moving painting than it is a deep or involved game. Despite that, The Midnight Walk manages to be more than the sum of its parts, delivering an aptly moody dark fantasy adventure.

Across six chapters, your mountain climb will see you enter various biomes, each the domain of a different creature, beast or ominous figure of the night. In a quasi–Psychonauts kind of way, you’ll spend this chapter learning about this enemy, including how they came to be, how to resolve their conflicts and make their world just that little bit brighter again. It’s a compelling setting as you feel truly transient in your journey; waltzing through swamps, a haunted and abandoned mining town and cave systems. This feeling is only multiplied when you recall that following your every step is also a big Baba Yaga-esque walking hut named Housy, setting up new rest points at the start of each chapter.

These environments and monsters are depicted hauntingly and beautifully. Rickety houses tower over the player as you walk deserted cobblestone streets. You’ll come out of the cold wind and snow to find a skeleton man taking refuge under a giant folded open book, sitting by a campfire; a storyteller with a banjo by his side. Similarly, hostile enemies are incredibly eerie and creepy and can make your skin crawl as they charge full steam toward you. Monsters can be four-legged giant beasts that are walking towards you on flimsy legs, opening up their clay pot skull to unveil a horrifying fleshy mess underneath when they near you. A big, sludgy swamp monster will do its paces around its biome, still sending a chill down your spine if it’s far away due to its giant, probing, bulging blue eyes always watching you.

The biggest compliment I can give to The Midnight Walk is that it feels like you’re journeying through your very own dark fairy tale fantasy picture book; a Brothers Grimm story for the new ages told all through the medium of games and interactivity. The chapter-based approach, where you’re exploring a new legend every hour or so, complements this feeling well, as does the imagery that leaps off the screen at all times. It’s an incredibly tactile feeling world, one that I imagine is only better in VR (I don’t currently have one, not for lack of trying!) with its enveloping 3D Audio and dark scenes.

Where that tactility won’t translate is in the gameplay. No matter the puzzle or the moment-to-moment gameplay, The Midnight Walk’s offerings here are largely boiled down to the word ‘serviceable.’ A lot of your journey and puzzle solving is emphasised by light. Your friendly little potboy that trudges along with you can cause a spark out of his head, and light up nearby candles to help illuminate the way. Though they can vary in how involved they are (organising when to light up this candle before that one so that they’re all lit at the same time before any run out, etc), a lot boil down to using the flame from Potboy or the flame from the gun that uses fiery ammunition to progress.

The Midnight Walk’s most unique mechanic is one where the player character can close their eyes by holding the left trigger. This is used to heighten the audio mix so that you can better note sounds of interest when in pursuit of a nigh-invisible creature, or an indication of where to go in more labyrinthine sections. Closing your eyes is also used to change the world around you: often, you’ll come across blocks in your path that can only be cleared if you close your eyes when looking in the direction of a point of interest. In some bone-chilling puzzles, you have to let a pursuer chase you as close as possible, freezing them into stone by closing your eyes at the last moment so that they rest on a pressure plate. It’s an interesting and well-thought-out juxtaposition to the game’s primary light sources as a puzzle mechanic. To survive The Midnight Walk, you must not just embrace the light, but also embrace the dark.

Still, for all the small nuggets of inventive puzzles, there are frustrating hurdles that aren’t necessarily all that hard, but are nevertheless joyless to work through. The fire gun is almost pointless, used as a limp deterrent for enemies that get a bit too close. I’m not asking for a high-octane shooter, but something with a bit more punch; when you consider this with how sparingly you need to use it to light candles without Potboy… It’s a mechanic that’s not needed. Most egregiously, I found a late-game puzzle focused on light, where I had to handle a bunch of levers to rotate a series of objects to cast a pair of shadows on the wall. Finding the exact shape you need to have the shadows in to clear this is endlessly frustrating because it doesn’t give you a reference guide or meaningful feedback as you’re experimenting.

Despite all of these mixed feelings, The Midnight Walk rewards some additional exploration. Off-beaten paths or following solving a puzzle in a way alternative to the main intended purpose, you’re finding records of the soundtrack, film tapes, diorama figures, and audio logs to later be viewed in Housy. It’s not often a game (much less a horror game) offers interesting collectibles, so it’s refreshing to see your collection grow in this bespoke hut. Soon, your walls fill up with tapestries of collected vinyl, and shelves carry figures of the big baddies you’ve faced throughout the campaign. These film tapes provide additional lore and storytelling, something I always made a point to seek out whenever I went back to Housy. Most of all, this is how I prefer to enshrine The Midnight Walk in my memory: not the rough spots, but sitting away in that cozy hut. A heavy snow storm is outside. A fire is brewing in the Housy’s centre. Potboy napping in a corner, and the game’s eloquent soundtrack playing in the background.