Night Call is a narrative, investigative game that sees you play as Houssine, a Parisian cab driver who works the night shift. Throughout the game, you learn that Houssine has been haunted by a murky past and a criminal record who has been afforded a second chance at life. You’re carrying out your nightly routine when a serial killer murders your passenger and puts Houssine in a coma for aNight Call is a narrative, investigative game that sees you play as Houssine, a Parisian cab driver who works the night shift. Throughout the game, you learn that Houssine has been haunted by a murky past and a criminal record who has been afforded a second chance at life. You’re carrying out your nightly routine when a serial killer murders your passenger and puts Houssine in a coma for a month. You awake from your coma and you’re eventually back on the job. Not long after that a cop by the name of Busset enters your cab and effectively blackmails you into digging up clues in regards to her various suspects in the murder case. Because of Houssine’s shady and criminal past, Busset tells Houssine that he’ll go jail for the crime if he refuses to work with her.
There are three cases to choose from and the investigation for each of them last 7 nights. Each case’s core gameplay loop is the same: ferrying passengers to their destinations all across Paris, listen to their stories, get paid, dig up clues for your case and hopefully accuse the right suspect. When your shift is over, you go back to your apartment to parse through information and clues pertaining to the case. I rather enjoyed the duality that Night Call presents here: working a fairly mundane and unspectacular job as a cab driver in contrast to the information-heavy, problem-solving and no doubt stressful job as a private investigator where it’s your ass on the line if you **** this up.
The interactions and storytelling from various cab patrons is where Night Call gets kind of interesting. Passengers really seem to open up to you, talking about their relationship issues, their life’s stories and various personal experiences, among others. Some stories/characters are memorable, just a name a few: there’s one passenger who tells a story about how he was so startled by a flock of birds in his backyard that he ran back inside and slammed the sliding door shut, not realizing that his family’s dog was sticking it’s neck out through the open door and was effectively decapitated. This is the sort of death sequence I’d expect out of a Final Destination movie, so seeing something like that pop up here was kind of jarring and morbidly ridiculous. You also get a passenger that is a black cat that has seemingly run away from home. Not only does is it give you a destination, it leaves a decent tip for you as well. Lastly, there’s this one passenger that’s recently undergone some form of brain surgery to merge his brain with a computer chip that allowed him to not only obtain information on a bystander you both drove past, but also hack an ATM machine that allowed him to pay his fare. There are also some surreal interactions that involves a ghost from a bygone era of Paris and a time traveller warning you about serious events in the future.
There are dialogue choices with each passenger interaction and while some of dialogue can culminate into grabbing achievements, most of them don’t seem to be of much consequence in terms of steering the direction of the story one way or the other from it’s mostly pre-design ending. Some passenger interactions will grant you a clue to help with your investigation as indicated by a file folder notification that reads “New Clue available in your room”. You can also drive to various investigation points marked with a eye ball icon on the map which provide you with important information and more story related content.
Night Call also has some resource management mechanics as well. You have to make sure that you don’t run out of gas for your cab or run out of money. If you run out of money, you fail the investigation. I understand the hint of realism the developers might’ve been going for here as well as adding in some other form of difficulty not related to the investigations, but in practice this resource management loop was a non-factor. I’m convinced you have to actively **** yourself over here if you want fail an investigation this way.
When your shift is over, you head back to your apartment to sort out information you’ve collected. The suspects and any clues are all displayed on a cork board with certain clues being connected. Unfortunately, for an investigative, detective style game, you’re not in control of which clues and information get connected to which suspect; the game does all of that for you. This is unfortunate since it does remove a layer of difficulty and control for the player and is kind of immersion-breaking for me.
Overall, I found Night Call excelled at being more of a visual novel than an investigative game. The stories told are memorable, while the investigation and detective mechanics are fairly bare bones and come up short in their overall execution. However, I’m willing to take a chance on an indie game with an interesting premise, even if the execution is flawed in some aspects.… Expand
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