I just played through Subway midnight and, overall, it was ok. The game has this amazing atmosphere, with incredible scenarios and an unmatched style, but the gameplay and puzzles range from frustrating to straight up boring. It's really not a good game.

(Warning: creepy screenshots will be used throughout this review)

Let's start with the possitives. The game's style is absolutely incredible. The 2D sprites are super cute. So simple and yet so expresive. Couple that with the reaslitically-rendered 3D environments and you got a game with absolutely beautiful graphics. The character design is also great, with every character being distinguishable from each other, even when they only appear for one scene. Visually speaking, it's an amazing experience.

The main thing you'll be doing throughout your playthrough is walking through train cars. Just hold W and get to the door to progress to the next one. While this might sound boring, it's probably the best part of the game. You see, while some cars are just regular, empty subway cars, most of them have stuff happening inside. Sometimes a bunch of creepy figures will be watching you as you walk. Sometimes you'll find a mirror copy of Lizzbeth that chases you until you exit the car. Sometimes you'll have to outrun a giant monster before they get to you. It's fun to walk through the cars and wonder what creepy thing you'll find in the next one. This is an incredibly visual game, so it's the simple parts like these that shine the most.

As you play it you get to experience the story of what happened to the missing children that entered this subway. You don't get told much, and what you're told is super confusing, but it's still fun to experience the stories of each kid and try to find out what happened to them.

I do have one little problem with it, and it's that you can't get the good ending on your first playthrough. It's not that bad, since on your second playthrough you get teleported immediately to the parts you missed, but it's still a very cheap thing to do.

But that's about all the possitive things i can say about this game, because the rest of it is just... boring. See, every once in a while the developer remembers that they're supposed to be making a game, so they'll throw in special rooms with a puzzle or objective to complete. These are the absolute worst. Both the game's movement and camera were designed to work on straight corridors and nothing else, but suddenly you'll have to free-roam through a room with holes in the floor that you can't even see because of how bad the camera is made, or you'll have to somehow try to maneuver slow-ass Lizzbeth through a bunch of deadly lasers, or you'll have to try and navigate a maze that you have to start over every time you reach a dead end. The movement is not good enough to justify having to repeat these gigantic rooms every time you mess up (especially since most of them are just trial-and-error).

And that's my problem with this game. It would've been an incredible experience if the developer had made a game where you just press W and see the creepy story unfold, but they got too ambitious with some of the rooms while neglecting to adapt the gameplay to fit them, so it just ends up being a frustrating experience. And it sucks even more because the story is really fun!

I also wanna mention the fact that the game is really loud and disorienting. Every once in a while the game will try to startle you by playing an incredibly loud sound and rapidly changing the visuals, for example, let's say you're getting close to a door and it closes right before you get to it. That would be fine and creepy, except that the game HAS to couple that with a super loud CRASH sound, a camera zoom out and a color palette change. And it does this multiple times, for no reason, even for dumb things like you solving a puzzle. This is not scary, it's just disorienting and annoying.

Anyway let's talk about colin's game.

There's this section in the middle of the game where you have to slowly walk through a 3D environment picking up gems, and I think it's a great metaphor for all that's wrong with this game. There's cheap, super loud jumpscares on the first half, yet nothing to do but walk on the second half. Yeah the atmosphere is creepy and all, but as you're walking there's literally nothing else happening. Nothing to look at. It's like playing Slender but if the map was only trees and without the ominous white guy chasing you. Worst part is that just this one part goes on for 15 whole minutes, which is way too much for a god damn three hour game. Like the whole game, it's not scary, it's annoying.

I think the best way to describe this game is violent, not in the contents of the game, but on how it treats the player. Loud noises that add nothing just to try and scare you. Forcing you to repeat boring parts of the game every time you mess up. Giving you no choice but to get the Bad Ending when you play it for the first time. There's so much style and potential to this game, but the gameplay keeps holding it back throughout the entire playthrough. It's a cool experience, but it could've been an amazing game. 5/10

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Completely unrelated to my review but I wanna mention this.

There's this part of the game where you go through 5 cars each with a different color as its theme. They're in the order of the color spectrum (Red, orange, yellow, green, blue) and you get a paint can of the corresponding color when you solve a puzzle in them. When you get to the sixth cart (purple), there's a bunch of gray paintings in an art gallery, but there are 6 paintings colored with those 6 colors. Obviously the solution to this room's puzzle is to interact with them in the order of the rainbow. Don't know it? That's fine, that's what the previous 5 rooms were for, so you can learn that on the fly. Easiest puzzle ever created.

how the fuck have I seen so many random people, friends, and youtubers say this is trial and error holy shit am I going insane