The Night is Grey (PC)
The Night is Grey begins with your character Graham stumbling across a little girl named Hannah all alone, and on a night with wolves about, he feels compelled to help get her safely to civilization. Graham comes off immediately as grouchy, often sharp and impatient with the child, but Hannah’s cheerfulness and innocence seem set to help him gradually thaw over the course of this point and click adventure… except, that isn’t what happens. While it could have gone for such easy sentimentality, Graham’s issues are far too deeply ingrained to be easily overcome through some warmth and unconditional kindness.
Graham isn’t utterly heartless though, in fact, in the early moments of the game he does show great concern for Hannah’s situation and even will call her cute or try to spare her information he doesn’t feel she’s ready for. Before you can begin to think of it too strongly as a fatherly attachment though, Graham will undercut it by reminding us he is a broken man. He speaks sharply to Hannah and yells at her, reminding us he isn’t suddenly a selfless patient man just because he is trying to do a good thing. This does make some of this adventure’s early chapters a bit rough to ride along with. The game kicks off with very little to go on, Graham running out of the woods as he evades a trio of wolves. Coming across a cabin, he finds Hannah there alone, and with her mother missing, he hopes to bring her to her grandparents so Hannah isn’t alone on this dangerous night. Hannah can act a little too precious at times, she’s eight but she talks in cute and silly ways that feel like they’re there purely to remind you she’s a child, but at others she can be remarkably well handled. It’s actually a bit worrisome at first when you hear her talk about her living situation and how her mother treated her, Hannah speaking about more mature topics in a way that you can tell there’s more going on that she lacks the ability to express. Hannah’s part of the story isn’t as deeply explored as Graham’s though, and he is definitely the more complex and perplexing personality to unravel.
Every chapter of The Night is Grey begins with a rather rough quote from Graham’s abusive childhood, it at first easy to sympathize a bit with Graham because it’s clear he’s had a tough life even before you learn about other things like some clear mental issues. As you explore though, clicking on objects to examine or collect them, you’ll also find Graham has a curious sense of humor. At times he will crack a pun or say something a touch silly about what he finds, but at others he can look at something like a trash can and say he must be looking at a mirror. It’s hard at first to tell if this is a joke or just a really weakly executed bit of self-loathing, but it remains a pretty consistent part of his behavior and feels more like part of a worrying trend of self-deprecation. Voice acting would have helped to better indicate whether it’s meant to be funny or serious until you notice how often he uses humor to criticize himself, but one of the better instances of making it more overt what he’s doing comes when Hannah lets you borrow her shoebill plush Storky. Graham is quick to use it as a conversational partner of sorts, speaking for it and having the kind of adversarial banter usually reserved for ventriloquism instead used to cement that even his humor is barbed with a distaste for himself. You can discuss a great deal of objects with Storky and you can sometimes find some amusing jokes rather than ones that beat down on Graham, but generally a lot of the game world is harsh to Graham already. Other characters you meet are openly hostile to him even when they’re strangers, again voice acting perhaps could have made it feel more reasonable since it could make him sound unnerving, strange, or mean to justify their reactions better.
The world in general in The Night is Grey might just be overly angry though, even eavesdropping on characters who never meet Graham revealing a sense of bitterness permeating the 1970s small mining town the game takes place in. Some of that underlying anger could come from what you learn about the environment you find yourself in though, the early chapters actually perhaps building up more about the village and its surrounding area than it does its two leads. It can feel a little strange that there isn’t a major follow-through on the history you learn about the town, although it does at least provide some useful elements to consider when you start to get a bigger picture of what the story’s truly about. The first four chapters of the game do seem a bit overly concerned with just getting out of the woods and away from the wolves, but the final two chapters take an interesting turn and start digging deeper into who Graham is. Once you’re able to get the full picture of what this story’s truly been about, it almost makes you want to run through again and reconsider everything you’ve seen along the way, the deeper layers more apparent with some important context you only get once you know the answers to some of the core mysteries. It doesn’t make up fully for some of the narrative meandering before then, but reflecting on the journey is much more intriguing than it would have been without the finale helping reshape some of what you thought you understood.
When it comes to the point and click gameplay and puzzle solving, The Night is Grey can be quite clever, if sometimes a bit too clever. The environments you explore are absolutely gorgeous, vivid detailed places that could almost work as postcards with the amount of love and care put into realizing these backdrops. The characters are drawn with flat colors and stand out against the scenery well, and while they are far simpler in design, they’re well animated and Hannah and Graham definitely have some purposeful movement to sell their personalities. To get through areas of The Night is Grey like the mine and park, you’ll need to find useful items in the environment to solve puzzles, and at first this can be a touch difficult because of the visual splendor. Some objects definitely stick out to help you find them, but others you might need to rely instead on the space bar to notice. Hold down the space bar and all areas of interest will be briefly highlighted, some things only receiving some of Graham’s quips while others are key to helping make your way onward. Your inventory items can be combined or used on other things in the environment, and one of the game’s first bits of being more interesting than just finding out what you have and trying it all is the fact that the environment itself often might as well be an inventory item. It’s not uncommon for the player to need to figure out something in the available areas that can meaningfully alter one of their objects, some of these like a device to straighten some metal apparent and even including a few brief timed button presses to complete while others require you to think a bit more about what’s on hand than just what looks useful. There are definitely moments this leads to issues, you’re trained to be clever in utilizing the environment to your advantage but then when you need to smash open a piggy bank a less than reasonable option is the one that ends up working when it feels like there could have been many more alternatives.
There are some more involved puzzles as well, situations with their own unique rules where figuring those rules out is often just as much the challenge as then finding out the exact actions required. One involves having a range of metal conductors necessary for activating a power box, the player able to put many inside but needing to figure out what exactly the purpose of such conductors are. There is an extra hint option for these more complicated puzzles to help you out if you’re truly stumped, but these usually have pretty solid logic. Your first estimation of the puzzle will probably not be the right answer, but after being left to consider it more, many puzzles do feel manageable enough. The inventory puzzles can be left to carry the game for a bit too long during those early chapters and then become surprisingly simple in those later chapters so it’s not a perfect mix, but it feels like it suits the story well in that regard since they both have ebbs, flows, and contentious moments that lead to parts you might like and others that leave you wishing things had gone a different way.
THE VERDICT: There’s a bitterness at the heart of The Night is Grey that can make it an uneasy play, its characters and subject matter often darkly uncomfortable when it actually starts looking beyond the basic plot of Graham and Hannah trying to find a way out of the woods. The roughness makes it hard to say if The Night is Grey is worth playing for that story despite its course being rather intriguing, but the puzzles at least fill in at times as the game makes a good use of activities that require a bit more thought than simple inventory usage even if it thinks a bit too out of the box at times. The beautiful backgrounds and effective approach to character animation help it along, but it still feels a bit uneven and hard to emotionally invest in even though the difficult subject matter is definitely part of the point.
And so, I give The Night is Grey for PC…
An OKAY rating. The challenging ideas The Night is Grey adds to its story as you uncover the deeper layers to it leave you with something more textured to consider after all is said and done, but it also can feel like more could have been done with a longer look at Graham and his relationship with Hannah. The denouement isn’t really there due to some of the presentation choices made, and while that leaves you with a lot to pick apart as you look back at the events, it also feels a touch inconclusive. The ride to getting there also takes its time drip-feeding compelling situations and stakes that rub up against the game not taking the easy route with how Hannah and Graham interact. If they gradually warmed up to each other that would fill some of the gaps but that would also remove some of the complexity, the crossroads reached being whether to commit to Graham’s characterization or alter what feels like the theme of the game. Graham’s a broken, imperfect man, a tough character to get invested in because of his flaws, but the subject matter that starts to crop up later on shows this deliberately isn’t a sunny story with easy answers. More time could have been spent on a follow through or more meaningful events could have been spaced out through the narrative, but it does feel a bit hard to come back from how it structure its late game reveals while preserving some of their impact. It ultimately feels like a matter of whether the subjects should be truly drilled down into and explored or left for your consideration and emotional reaction, but thankfully some expert artistry and a mostly effective range of puzzles helps to keep everything from resting on this imbalanced and thematically difficult narrative.
Maybe going the easy route and having Graham and Hannah become the best of pals would have earned it easy praise, but The Night is Grey is more thought-provoking for sticking to its guns. It is oppressively harsh at times for it and uncomfortable, perhaps a deeper window into Graham and clearer intent with the pieces it laid out could have made it more a tragedy or a commentary. If it’s a psychological thriller, it needed more time to really explore Graham to help him and us reach a satisfying conclusion, but even if you don’t care for pondering the game at length after you learn the full truth, it still has enough going for it to carry you to that elucidating finale.