Nocturne

Moby ID: 990
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Description official descriptions

It is the end of the Prohibition, and the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States of America. The Stranger is a mysterious operative of a secret organization known as "Spookhouse", founded by President Theodore Roosevelt to combat supernatural creatures. He investigates four cases, which can be played in any order and involve teaming up with a half-vampire to retrieve a powerful artifact from a castle in Germany, liberating a Wild West town from a zombie assault, fighting reanimated mobsters created by the mafia boss Al Capone in Chicago, and solving the mystery of a house with deadly traps.

Nocturne is an action game with survival horror elements. The game features 3D characters and pre-rendered backgrounds with fixed camera angles. The Stranger mostly fights with firearms, and has to confront monsters and mythological creatures. The player can opt to aim manually, or choose the auto-aim option from the menu.

Spellings

  • 厄夜驚悚 - Chinese spelling (traditional)

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Credits (Windows version)

46 People (44 developers, 2 thanks) · View all

Lead Programming
Programming
Additional Programming
Level / Scenario Design
Additional Graphics / Artwork
Music / Sound
Marketing
Writing / Dialogue / Story
User manual produced and printed by
  • Mars Publishing Company[www.marspub.com]
User manual Authorship by
  • After Hours Productions
Manual Publisher
Manual Coordination and Design
Manual Graphic Artist
Playtesting
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 80% (based on 31 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 34 ratings with 6 reviews)

Visually gorgeous survival horror adventure.

The Good
Nocturne has a rather interesting approach to it's layout. Rather than being put into a single, large adventure, you are given several smaller adventures which the main character, the stranger, experiences. This means you essentially get 4 different adventures within one overall story as well as a brief finale which opens up once the first 4 are all complete. This works very well and keeps the variety level high. The stranger is one of the coolest hero characters in any video game. Wearing a hat, dark glasses and a long trenchcoat he looks slightly reminisent of Caleb, the hero from 'Blood'. His dark, say what you think attitude and deadpan approach to conversation often leads to some funny lines. The graphics are utterly beautiful. Light shines realistically on walls and cloth flows wonderfully. The sound is equally impressive with some great orchestral music and beefy effects, the voice acting isn't bad either. The combat system in Nocturne is controlled with the mouse as your aiming device. This coupled with the laser slights that the stranger has equipped on his firearms make for the best and most intuitive system yet seen in a survival horror game, a genre usually plagued with poor combat.

The Bad
The action is very combat oriented so although there is a fair amount of adventuring to to aswell, you'll be firing a LOT of bullets by the end. Also the game isn't terribly scary. It has its moments but you never feel like you might be in serious trouble because you are always tooled up. There are points where you can get yourself in a lock if a group of creatures back you up against a wall and all you can do is wait 'till you die or restore a saved game. Finally, the wonderful graphics do come at a price in the system requirements. You're going to need a Pentium 3 and a decent graphics card to run this game at full speed and detail.

The Bottom Line
Nocturne is a great survival horror title that fans of the genre who like their fighting frenetic would be wise to check out.

Windows · by Sycada (177) · 2001

Film Noir meets Horror Classics

The Good
I must admit that the first time I played Nocturne I hated it. I mean, the graphics were not dark, the main character was this silly bad-ass wannabe, and the whole package was plagued with common places: vampires, zombies, werewolves, et cetera. I played this one right after I finished Clive Barker's Undying and I expected another 'serious' horror title with a mature and intelligent plot. It wasn't until I decided to give it another chance that I got the joke. Nocturne is not a 'serious' horror game. Nocturne doesn't innovate because it wasn't intended to.

Technically the game is good. Controlling has all the good and bad of a horror-survival a la Alone in the Dark, but adds some interesting uses for the mouse, wich gives you some more freedom of movement. I still prefer the freedom that only FPS can give, but I must admit Nocturne may be one of the smoothest games to play in its genre.

The atmosphere won't scare anyone (unless you still get scared with the Bela Lugosi kind of movies) but as I said, I don't think that was the idea. Nocturne seems to be more of a tribute to old horror movies, plagued with Film Noir cliches as to spice it up. The graphics are all dyied with this brownish colour that makes the whole picture look like an old movie. Besides that, the background designing is great.

The animation is fine, all the characters move in a very natural way... well, given the species each of them belong to. I specially liked the way Stranger's coat moves (and how it reacts to the wind, the running, the walking...); and the quite realistic movements of a girl you find tied to a bed in the fourth mission.

I loved the gore details, they are quite exaggerated and that makes them brilliant. The way the blood spills, the blood stains on floors and walls, the different ways the monsters die (sometimes they just fall on their knees, sometimes they start to lose limbs one by one until they die, sometimes the blow up in thousands of pieces), how they pick up their own severed limbs and attack you with them... sickly gore.

The monsters are indeed all those creatures we suffered millions of times in millions of Class-Z movies. If you can deal with this, the monsters are great. Once again, you won't find any innovation here, but all the characters play their part perfectly and are very well designed.

Same goes for the plot, even the few twists are all predictable; and noone can seriously consider it immersive at all; it doesnt' scare you and at times it gets so ridiculously cliched you just can't take it seriously. But then again, when you watch a Horror Classic this is the kind of thing you expect to find.

The music and the sound effects greatly add to the whole atmosphere. Here they are, all the cliched musical scores that will make you remember every pre-1980 horror movie you ever saw.

Every horror/survival title has two main characteristics: action and puzzles. In Nocturne, there are both of them; and both are great. The action sequences are not stupidly easy neither they are frustrating hard. The interface is smooth enough to make them challenging but not impossible. As for he puzzles, they are quite a couple. If you play the missions in order, you will find them more often and increasingly hard as you move on, but they keep easy enough as to be understandable by anyone. As for the missions, it was a very good idea to offer them as seperate levels you can play in any order you want.

The Bad
There isn't really much to complain about Nocturne. Everything that looks 'bad' looks that way because it was intended to.

I can't get to like the way you control the character in this kind of games. Although Nocturne's interface is pretty smooth and I didn't find any serious issues (like the hot-spots thing in AITD4), I miss the freedom of movement that only FPS's can give.

I think the plot doesn't intend to innovate, and maybe it is naive on purpouse, but sometimes it gets TOO naive, borderline stupid. Some characters need some more work and some (like the hook-handed Coronel) would have been better left out of the picture.

I really didn't get what they wanted to do with the Night Vision. It may be the most USELESS feature I EVER bumped into in a game. I never really needed it in any place of the whole game, and when I tried to make use of it 'just for kicks', I found it wouldn't help in any sort of way. I just don't dare to call it 'a bad feat', but I sure don't understand what was it intended to be.

This one is maybe silly, but I HATE the way Stranger holds some of the weapons. Walking around with the hands in the air like he does with the two pistols makes him look like a zombie, or just a stupid guy. Same goes to the way he uses the axes and swords. In this case his movements reminds me of those toy birds that you push with a finger and they swing their heads back and forth.

The Bottom Line
Film Noir meets Horror Classics. Get every cliche of both genres, put them in a blender; and voila: you got Nocturne. This game doesn't innovate nor scare. Nocturne is just a tribute to horror classics.

Other than that, the interface lets you play smoothly, the graphics are good, the music matches up perfectly; and the game overall is FUN. Nocturne doesn't invent anything, but it does it perfectly.

Windows · by Slug Camargo (583) · 2003

Disappointing entry into the horror genre

The Good
Graphically, Nocturne is a beautiful game. The engine works great with lighting and shadows. Generally has good voice acting. Interesting premise and fairly good level design too.

The Bad
1. Nocturne really isn't that scary. Why? Because the main character doesn't give a damn. He doesn't react to the monsters, he just shoots them. So if he isn't concerned why should we be? Also, the only scares Nocturne can establish are the surprise scares- monsters jumping through windows, etc. No real sense of dread here.

  1. Controls suck. The Nocturne engine looks great, but there are some serious clipping problems. Shooting works fine, and the character models sustain localized damage (ie, you can shoot someone's arm off,) but hand to hand combat is terrible. Running, walking, jumping are all way too challenging and inaccurate.

  2. Bad camera. There are terrible camera angles in this game. Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil style camera angles work well within buildings, but sections of Nocturne involve running through the woods. This is horrible. Many times I fell to my death, only because the camera angle did not show how close I was to a cliff. The combination of poor camera angles and poor controls killed me more than any monster.



The Bottom Line
Poorly designed "survival horror" game focuses too much on graphics not enough on gameplay.

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2001

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Trivia

Cover

The picture on Nocturne's Box is an overexposed photograph. There was a time when people thought that overexposed photos were proof of ghosts and otherworldly spirits.

Dreamcast version

Nocturne was going to be ported to the Sega Dreamcast. The console's early death killed the port as well.

Legacy

The three Blair Witch Project games use Nocturne's engine. In fact this was announced by the developers well in advance. That's why we see the characters from the "Spookhouse" again in Blair Witch Project 1. In Terminal Reality's later game Bloodrayne, the character of Svetlana Lupescu was originally going to be the protagonist, before Rayne was introduced.

Music

Much of the music heard in Nocturne is also heard in the background of various episodes of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

References

Like any good game with horror element this one has its fair share of horror references. The mobster-monsters are akin to Frankenstein. The vampires are from Dracula. There are also many references to H.P. Lovecraft, Doc Holiday went to Miskatonic University. And the mission in which The Stranger faces an Elder God.

Title

Ever wondered what Nocturne means? It's "a pensive, lyrical piece of music (especially for the piano)". It has got nothing to do with noctural or nightly activities.

TV series

In 2002, a television series based on Nocturne was in development by Collision Entertainment. As of 2012, it seems the project was cancelled. Their website description of the project was:

When Teddy Roosevelt's 1898 hunting expedition in Cuba exposes him to a werewolf, he later founds "The Spookhouse", a secret research facility to covertly investigate the supernatural. Decades later, FDR orders Chicago secret service agent and unsung Untouchable Tabby Kildaire to find the Spookhouse and shut it down. Tabby reluctantly agrees, beginning a journey more dark and disturbing than any case he's ever investigated and to his horror, learns that monsters are real. Based on the video game by Terminal Reality and G.O.D.

Awards

Information also contributed by ClydeFrog, Mark Ennis, MasterMegid and Roger Wilco

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MAT.

Additional contributors: Accatone, Sycada, Jeanne, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger.

Game added March 7, 2000. Last modified February 28, 2024.