You have no way of predicting why it's just bad luck. Pick the wrong dialogue choice? Bam, lose 10 health. But what's more frustrating is that a lot of Not Tonight 2's plot is told through a series of choose-your-own-adventure text boxes, and those are replete with all sorts of early King's Quest-style punitive bullshit that can terminate a run out of nowhere. There are a couple of vague, secret objectives at the end of each chapter which replenish your stats, and over time I was able to achieve those with reliable consistency. The problem is the way you supply those pools is almost entirely random. If either drop to zero, you're presented with a game over screen. When you're not checking IDs, you'll be staring at an atlas, moving from town to town, and managing your health and morale meters. That lack of focus carries over into some of Not Tonight 2's more ancillary design choices. This is the sort of development philosophy I thought we shed in 1992, right around the time Zork made the jump to 3D. Maybe I'd just like that to be treated with a bit more gravity, a little more rage. We do live in a country where innocent people are being conspicuously detained over questions about their heritage. I mean, the spark of the narrative here is eminently relatable. I think there are moments where Panic Barn latches onto some genuinely trenchant commentary, but the overall vibe here is so silly and relies on so many lowest-common-denominator cliches that I found the tone to be a little unfocused, like a synthesis of gray, formless Twitter takes. A big-tech, neoliberal billionaire promised me deliverance in Raleigh his name was "Tom Swooney." At one point I found myself in a chicken slaughterhouse… where I used the same bouncer apparatus to decide which chickens were sent off to be butchered? I don't know, this game goes places. On a jaunt to the southern border I found that Trump did in fact build his wall, but ironically, these days it's used more for keeping Americans in rather than foreigners out. America might be in freefall, but developers Panic Barn sure enjoyed painting the decay.Īll of this is to say that Not Tonight 2 is not a particularly subtle videogame. In San Antonio, for instance, I worked a rodeo complete with a monolithic red-eyed cowboy looming in the background, like a sinister version of the famed Big Tex. Not Tonight 2 wields vintage, SCUMM-era pixel art with modern processing power, and it brings to mind the most verdant vistas you could find in the Monkey Island series. (Also, the air is unbreathable in Los Angeles, but that's about par for the course.) You don't get to do much exploring within these cities-your character essentially stands in front of a static panorama with a clipboard-but the imagery itself is gorgeously rendered. Some sort of unnamed pandemic is raging out of control, to the point that most of the Midwest is in a constant state of plague. Climate change has put New York City under water. The south has seceded again, snapping the borders in two. The highlights in Not Tonight 2 are found in the vividly destitute depiction of the US after multiple cascading crises. Not Tonight 2 is not a particularly subtle videogame.
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