The Midnight Walk is like taking a stroll through Tim Burton’s mind. As a game, its visuals are absolutely unique and darkly beautiful, but is there enough to do along your walk to warrant putting on the headset? Read on to find out.

The Midnight Walk Details:

Publisher: Fast Travel Games
Developer:
 MoonHood
Available On: Steam (VR optional), PS5 (VR optional)
Reviewed On: Quest 3 via Steam Link
Release Date: May 8th, 2025
Price: $40

Gameplay

The Midnight Walk, as the name implies, falls pretty squarely into the ‘walking simulator’ genre, leaning mostly on its visuals and narrative to carry fairly basic gameplay involving light puzzles and the occasional hide-and-seek with monsters.

The main draw is definitely the game’s unique art style, in which the developers say they hand-crafted nearly all of the assets and then 3D scanned them to be used in the game. The result is a dark, Burtonesque world that’s both artfully grotesque and occasionally beautiful.

Image courtesy MoonHood

Seeing it all up close in VR is a very cool way to experience all the work this must have taken. You effectively play a character the size of a mouse, so you can see all the fine textures and surface details of the objects up close. Consistently good attention to lighting and composition means there’s always something visually intriguing to look at along your way.

Photo by Road to VR

Though the game is pitched as featuring ‘stop motion’ animations, only parts of the game are done in that style. Many of the animations are done with smooth interpolation, even in the same sequence of motions from the same character. The jarring combination of both styles unfortunately looks awkward, almost like an unintended bug.

Photo by Road to VR

The Midnight Walk’s gameplay really never expands beyond basic puzzling and the occasional hide-and-seek sequences with some delightfully twisted creatures. I never had any of those ‘eureka’ moments with the puzzles, nor any set-piece gameplay sequences that felt truly memorable. There’s also very little that could be considered ‘VR native’ gameplay… the hallmark of many games designed to be playable on both flatscreen and in VR.

The Midnight Walk isn’t quite scary enough to be called a horror game, despite the overall imagery being that of a long-forgotten nightmare.

Photo by Road to VR

While basic gameplay that’s ultimately in service to the visuals and narrative isn’t always a bad thing (after all, I quite enjoyed Dear Esther [2012]), the game’s story feels poetic and obtuse.

Photo by Road to VR

It’s told by many different unnamed narrators, and didn’t establish any characters that I felt attached to. Its cryptic nature didn’t resonate with me personally, which meant it wasn’t much of a force to carry me forward in the game or make me feel invested in the world.

With basic gameplay and an obtuse narrative, the game stands largely on its unique and well-crafted visuals; my main reason for continuing to play was to see—literally see—what would come next.

Immersion

Photo by Road to VR

I appreciate that we have the option of seeing the game’s darkly beautiful world up close and personal through a headset. But the lack of VR native gameplay means the game doesn’t feel like a ‘must play’ in VR.

For instance, at several points in the game when you find a key to open a door, you don’t even get to physically put the key into the keyhole and turn the lock. You simply pull it out of your inventory and it floats into place and magically unlocks the door for you.

At various moments in the game you’re asked to hang onto a bar attached to a flying machine which whisks you from one place to another. Do you reach up and grab the bar with your hand to hang onto it without falling? Of course not… you just ‘Press A’ to magically attach to the machine while it flies you to the next location. Do you reach out with your hand and open the door to enter your house? Of course not, just ‘Press A’.

Photo by Road to VR

It’s these details—these missed opportunities for hands-on interactions—that are so often a hallmark of VR-optional design, and unfortunately detracts from immersion.

The closest thing in the game to VR native gameplay is the ability to close your eyes and ‘listen’ for the direction of audio cues that would guide you to certain key things in the environment (or change parts of the environment if you were looking at them before you closed your eyes).

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On PSVR 2 I take it this would be achieve by actually closing your eyes (thanks to the headset’s eye-tracking), but on PC VR (as I played it), ‘closing your eyes’ was done by holding a trigger instead.

While the PSVR 2 version would have been a bit more immersive, the mechanic was never used in a way that felt particularly compelling.

Comfort

Photo by Road to VR

While The Midnight Walk in VR is generally comfortable thanks to slow movement, the game frequently grabs hold of the player’s head during cutscenes, usually panning slowly, but occasionally sweeping your view across a large area. Sometimes in these scenes the horizon is purposefully tilted. For some these moments may be uncomfortable. For me they were infrequent enough to be a little jarring but not outright uncomfortable.

‘The Midnight Walk’ Comfort Settings – May 8th, 2025

Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages
English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish (Latin America)
Dialogue audio
Languages English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
✖ (via accessibility option)
Adjustable player height

 

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overall
6.5
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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Oh, I was very intrigued by this… it's a pity they didn't design it properly for VR!

  • Runesr2

    6.5/10?! Again RoadToVR, like with Lone Echo 2, trashes some of the finest VR experiences. If VR has friends like that, does it need enemies?

    Let's instead hear it from the users:

    PSVR2/PS5: 93% average rating based on 345 ratings.
    Steam: 89% are positive out of 122 ratings.

    Personally I could accept a 8.5 rating, but not 6.5.

    • Herbert Werters

      The ratings of VR games are generally very far removed from the professional ratings that have existed for computer games for decades anyway. My tip is to simply check Metacritic to see how the games are rated on average by the press and users.

    • Jonathan Winters III

      Both roadtovr and UploadVR have been mostly harshly critical of most VR games. Perhaps it's a power trip because they run the biggest VR news sites, or perhaps they don't "get" that throwing shade on indie devs only hurts the VR industry.

      • Ben Lang

        Our reviews are always about the games themselves. If we were to artificially prop up VR games that aren't good based on the hope that it would somehow help the industry, we'd only be hurting the industry in the long term.

        Telling people a game is great when it isn't would mean that if they play it themselves and say "this is considered great for a VR game?" then we've given them an incorrect expectation, and one that could turn them off of VR altogether.

  • Jonathan Winters III

    "The jarring combination of both styles unfortunately looks awkward, almost like an unintended bug."

    Exactly my impression. Amazing that made it out the door. They must have not betatested it with real-world gamers.