Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy

The Good
Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy is a third-person futuristic/sci-fi adventure game developed by Trecision and published by Team 17. Anyone who still owns an Amiga will know the British company released high-profile titles such as Alien Breed, Project-X, Assassin, and SuperFrog, among others. So it’s not surprising that this title has also made its way onto the machine.

Trecision has been taking cues from Beneath a Steel Sky as well; the game is set in Union City, and the main character – Joshua Reeve – has the same personality as Robert Foster. The city in question has been plagued by a series of terrorist attacks by a group calling themselves Genesis. You have been hired by your old friend, Hugh Martens, to investigate the disappearance of Simon Ruby, a colleague who was in the middle of the investigation when he vanished.

Anyone who has played Beneath a Steel Sky should feel right at home with the interface. You have a single mouse cursor that can be moved around the screen at will. Text appears if a person or object can be interacted with. Clicking the left mouse button examines an object on screen, while clicking the right one allows Reeve to manipulate that object. Moving the cursor down near the bottom of the screen brings up a BASS-style inventory. Clicking on items causing it to rotate, allowing you to use it on screen or with another inventory item.

Moving the cursor over the edge of the screen allows you to walk between locations. If it is a new location, the words “Go to...” will appear, otherwise the location’s name is spelled out. You can click the left mouse button while the text appears to see Reeve walk toward that location, or even better, click the right button to teleport Reeve over there. It will just be like Phantasmagoria 2, where the main character had the ability to teleport around the room.

Although most of the puzzles in the game are inventory-based, some require you to jot down some notes. An example is a puzzle in the zoo. You have to match up the symbols according to a book you find in the zoo library in order to open a passage within the Sphinx’s base. There is a bit of pixel hunting as well. To complete the aforementioned Sphinx puzzle, you have to click in the middle of the puzzle, in an exact spot.

Reeve has to explore over 80 locations to get what needs to be done. Trecision has also used idea from “Blade Runner” for some of these locations. There are flying cars, automation robots, mechanical exhibits at the zoo, and even virtual assistants that are right up there with the Replicants. These hand-drawn backgrounds look good, and the soundtrack to the game is fantastic, with most of the music blending in with the situation. My favorite piece was when Reeve is exploring Union Square.

Most of the dialogue in the game is mostly restricted to Reeve telling you what he is doing. Subtitles are presented in the AmigaOS 2.x font and are turned on by default. From time to time, there is a long cut-scene with lots of dialogue, to give the player some more background information, and these cut-scenes can pause to present the player with a list of choices they can click on. I found it a bit hard to follow the plotlines, but games like this are just like the Matrix movies: play it enough times and eventually you’ll understand everything.

Up to twelve save games can be stored, and these are presented as thumbnails with descriptions below them. You can also load a game right from the autorun menu instead of starting up the game first. Nightlong spans three compact discs, and you are required to swap between them at some point in the game. To make up for this, the installation completes in no time.

The Bad
There isn’t anything bad about this game.

The Bottom Line
Nightlong is an futuristic sci-fi adventure game released around the same time that AAA companies were killing the genre. It is an excellent title that pays homage to "Blade Runner" and Beneath a Steel Sky. The graphics and sound is excellent, and the game has a reasonable dose of puzzles, most of them inventory-based. Even though the plot can be confusing, don't let that stop you from enjoying it.