Night Call
A mysterious serial killer stalks the streets of modern-day Paris. The body count rises, and the police are no closer to catching the culprit. You are a taxi driver and survivor to the killer’s most recent attacks, having barely escaped with your life. You have seven nights to help find the killer, or the police will pin it on you. These next few shifts will be far from ordinary or safe… Night Call is a non-linear, narrative-driven noire investigation game. You are no detective, but you do have a gift. Around you, people feel more at ease. They talk. They share their thoughts, their emotions, their stories… their secrets. To passengers, you are more than just a driver; you are also a friend, a confidant, a shrink. A voyeur catching a glimpse under the masked but very real lives throughout the City of Light. And you’ll need to play these roles well if you want to catch the killer. Use the limited time you have available each night to gather clues while earning money to pay your bills. Drive passengers to their destinations, hear their stories and choose your responses carefully—some are just regular people with a tale to tell, while others might reveal a clue that’s key to your investigation. Follow the right leads to uncover new info about the suspects, and don’t forget to make enough money to buy gas and pay your bills.
Steam User 20
Even City of Light has dark moments.
Night Call is a noir-inspired adventure video game, co-developed by MonkeyMoon and Black Muffin, published by Raw Fury.
Story
In Night Call you play as Houssine, Parisian taxi driver who during one of his usual fares gets attacked by a serial killer. Awakening from a coma, and with speedy recovery, Houssine back behind the wheel wants to discover an identity and track down his attacker.
While game consists of 3 different story scenarios, all feature same story outline described above.
Gameplay
Game combines murder mystery with little economy management. It's quite simple, every night you have to pick up passengers and complete fares to earn money while simultaneously discovering clues for your investigation.
On a in-game map of Paris which appears every night you can select and drive to destinations you choose. Main goal is picking up passenger(s) and driving them to required location. Here a conversation system kicks in as our driver can chat with characters in a back seat about all kinds of topic while you can select dialogue options. Talk about their current situation and problems, about more world related issues, maybe get a piece of information or two about a killer. Additionally different mid-drive suprises can occur, and you can select what to do at specific moment. If you are not interested in chatting, game quite often lets you simply say nothing and just have a peaceful drive to a destination. Once you reach your place you earn money and a tip, which get added to your wallet.
Money is spend on fuel which you can get at local gas stations, and overall spendings related to living, appearing at the end of every night.
Every once in a while you can drive to destination related to an investigation, and if you play it right, get solid amount of intel to help your case.
As night ends you go back to the board placed in your apartment to check how investigation goes. Here you see your suspects and collected clues. Specific intel has to be investigated first which will waste your time. When all is said and done you take a rest and prepare yourself for another dive into dark streets and alleyways of Paris.
Game features Passidex, which contains important information and details about all passangers Houssine has met!
Playtime, replayability and other modes
Each scenario took me 2 hours to beat, considering there are 3 of them it's easy to do math and state it takes roughly 6 hours to complete all.
If you are interested in getting to know all passengers then you should once again play scenarios for more encounters.
Game features a "Free Roaming" mode in which you can travel and meet passengers without having to worry about fuel or cash. Unfortunately mode is locked to one night only so characters that have more than one encounter go to waste, forcing you to still play scenarios anyway.
Pros and cons
Without any doubt I can say that visual style of the game mixed with minimalistic character animations is very pleasing. Soundtrack is also a strong point of the game, and is a very important aspect as it sets a mood for conversations instead of voice acting. (And does a great job at it!)
However characters and overall writing take a cherry on top making it games strongest aspect.
Unique, interesting to encounter, very diverse and well rounded. You can go from rather comical encounter with a hypocritcal critique to a more mature talk as a retired cop gives you a harsh life lesson from his past. Every minute games mood can turn around and hit you with a completly different feeling and I absolutely loved that. Even aspects such as amount of scenarios each have, as I know some people are annoyed that certain characters have five or six different encounters while some only one or two, makes it even better, as it further expands upon overall life of our protagonist as a driver. Sometimes you have regular passengers and sometimes you see people once in your life.
This also applies to our protagonist who has dark background which you slowly discover as you play more.
Simplicity of the gameplay means it's easier to appreciate solid writing game offers but on the other hand it feels a bit underdeveloped and tiresome. There are aspects in which it could go deeper, especially when it comes to managing your taxi, to increase even further importance of balancing between investigation and work and how dangerous it is. Without it gameplay gets rather boring quickly as you click from one character to another, and sometimes you click on a gas station. It's why I'm thankful for short scenario times.
Investigations were okay but again, due to rather weak gameplay it never feels like actual serial killer mystery. Like you are looking for a missing cat and not fighting for your life.
Finally, absolutely pesky engine problems in this taxi. Bugs everywhere. Passidex entries are bugged, fares every once in a while bug (cannot collect money after one or game instantly ends a fare) and when returing to main menu you might end up with a black screen and nothing else.
Final words and conclusion
Honestly? This game works better as a game about people. Who live in Paris, travel through it, about different problems and issues that connect them to our hero.
You focus on their stories, on interpreting them.
I came for a interesting premise of a typical taxi driver who wants revenge, who maybe will utilize his work and conversation skills to squeeze out every piece of information that leads to a murderer in cold blooded way.
I stayed because of interesting characters and fantastic writing behind them, and left only after I met everyone in Paris who needed a cab.
Night Call offers excellent writing, great cast of characters to encounter and solid audiovisual side at expense of boring gameplay, pesky technical problems and weak mystery elements.
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Steam User 14
Night Call is a visual novel-taxi-driving-investigation game that has well written characters and honestly not much else. I liked it, but it only just barely ekes into a recommendation. The user interface can be buggy at times, refusing any input except exiting to a main menu, which happened several times to me. The overarching story of finding the serial killer who attacked you during one of your rides isn't very interesting. I don't feel like it's well implemented, as I didn't feel like there was any sort of strong gotcha moments that would expect for an investigation game. What IS well done, however, are the stories told by the passengers - stories of love, loss, lies, identity, sacrifice, and much more. This game certainly isn't for everyone, but if you're interested in what I can simply boil down to as a collection of short stories, this is a nice game to read.
Steam User 10
Deep, uncomplicated game play and compelling stories. If you like stories, and reading, this will be enjoyable. if you need action, go play a FPS.
Steam User 6
It made me cry twice, once at the ending and the other time when I realized this game takes place in France
Steam User 5
-Before I say anything further, game needs to be optimized. My GPU burns even tho I have a high end gaming PC.
-Story is ok. Nothing new but not boring. Classic noir.
-Well I like this kind of games and especially this kind of art style, so the game has its own charm. Maybe the character animations could use a little polish.
Steam User 4
Late night driving doomer jazz
If being a lonely and bitter private investigator in a noire world where it's always cold and raining is a fantasy of yours, give this game a try.
The premise of the game is that you are an ex-criminal with a shady past that now makes his living by driving a taxi. You survive the murder of a serial killer and the police leverage the fact that they know your past to blackmail you into being an undercover investigator for them. You have not seen the killer nor the killer has seen your face, which allows you to have them as passengers in your taxi (when they show up on the map).
You are given five suspects on which you have to gather clues by means of talking to them when they are a passenger, investigating leads (marked on the map by eye symbols), and talking to random passengers that might know something. The bulk of the clues are given to you directly by the police, though.
Gameplay wise, there's actually not much, mainly a bunch of clicking. You click to select which passenger to drive and you click a bunch of times to scroll through the stories that they have to tell you. After about 7 nights you have to give the police a name, mainly based on your hunch since there is never conclusive evidence. Anyway I guessed the killer's identity on the first try on all three cases so I'd say the game strikes a decent balance between the info you are given and the amount of guesswork.
The main appeal of the game are the stories of your passengers, each unique and interesting on their own. The atmosphere is also really well done, conveying it perfectly in a small number of coherent elements, among which the soundtrack is especially worthy of note.
My critique about this game is that if it's almost as if it's trying to be two different games at once.
The investigation part disrupts the passengers' stories part. Passengers' stories progress by picking them up repeatedly, and it cannot always be done because you have to prioritize the investigation. And even if you manage to pick them up more than one time, the time limit on your playthrough prevents you to progress them further. To address this, the developers have added a free roam mode, that I still have to try. By playing the main cases, each of the two elements felt like a side dish to the other and it was impossible to say which was the main one. Was the investigation slapped on top of the stories to give a purpose to the game or were the stories added in as filler because of the simplicity of the investigation mechanics?
Two other minor issues are that the FMV's are low bitrate and look chunky, and that the GPU usage is unusually high for a 2d monochrome game.
Anyhow, this game is undeniably charming and unique, and I'd definitely like to see its ideas developed further in a more coherent package.
Recommended on sale.
Steam User 2
Absolutely amazing detective thriller. Interacting with passengers felt almost as rewarding as solving the murders. My time on record has almost 8 hours, but I spent many more outside trying to connect the dots between evidence and killers. Highly recommend.
Played on Steam Deck using Proton GE 14, great experience. That said, Proton GE 10 froze occasionally, and Proton 7 and Experimental could not properly display the cutaway shots while driving passengers (generic test pattern image displayed).