Night Call – Review (PC)
If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to work the night shift as a cab driver in Paris, look no further. Night Call is one-part cab driving simulator and another part noir investigation.
You play as a Henry, the only surviving victim of a mass murderer that is making their presence known in Paris. As the game begins you’ve just awoken from a medically induced coma. You learn that your passenger was killed and you barely escaped death’s icy grip yourself. After some recuperation you’re back out on the streets working the night shift, driving passengers all around Paris. Your boss is scared for you as you’ve always been like a son to him so on your first night back out on the job. He stops by to show you the ropes and let you know how he feels about you driving again. You listen to his warnings but decide that it’s time for you to get back out there. As the passengers and the city come alive, you’ll find yourself at the heart of the investigation, working with the police to track down the killer.
Night Call is a narrative driven game that takes place primarily in your car. The cab simulator part of the game has you picking a customer nearby to pick up and you’ll simply take them to their destination. Along the way you’ll get into conversation about all sorts of interesting topics. A priest with a confession, a cop with a secret and a couple searching for the right donor – just to name a few. As you go through the game from night to night, you’ll encounter many of these people time and again and really get to know them. There are even a few surprise passengers along the way that will make you question your own sanity.
As you spend your nights driving around Paris listening for clues to bring the killer out of hiding, you’ll be tasked with making enough money to pay your bills and cover your gas as you drive around. Night Call has multiple difficulties that let you choose just how difficult you want this to be. Story mode makes money easier to come by. While balanced, it is a little more realistic and the way the game is intended to be played. Hard mode makes money tighter and the clues harder to put together. The conversations that you have with the customers can be truly fascinating, but the whole aspect of earning money, paying for gas and other expenses becomes an unnecessary burden that can break the experience unnecessarily. You won’t get a “game over” often, but one of the few times that we did was due to running out of money. The boss that we were like a son to basically turns his back on you when you run out of funds and leaves you for the wolves. The money you makes seems to be minimal compared to your expenses, even on the easiest difficulty.
The investigation seems to play second chair to the cab driving simulator aspects of the game and, though the game is based on true events, the killers never seem to be that menacing because the conversations in the cab rarely seem to touch on the killer. Somehow the evidence appears in your apartment each night and it’s there that you can look it over and decide who you think the killer is. Every few nights the detective will touch base with you and let you know when they’ll be in contact and when they’ll need you to give them a name. When the time comes to present the evidence and give them a name, it feels more like a guess than a fact-based answer.
Once the police decide that your suspect has enough evidence against them to bring them in, they ask one more favor from you – pick up the suspect in your car and get the confession on the way. Succeed and you’ll be free, fail and who knows what terrible things might happen to you.
Recommendation: Night Call is an incredibly interesting and dialogue heavy game with a lot of things, potentially too many things, going on at once. The time you spend talking to the people that you pick up is definitely the best part of the game. The game would almost be stronger if that was the main focus instead of the investigation – because that’s where it tends to fall apart. It feels like the evidence is collected without your knowledge and you are forced to pick a killer with no more than clever guess work. If you’are looking for a dialogue heavy game this could scratch that itch.
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
Night Call was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion
