When you think of a detective drama, you largely imagine a grizzled, traumatized gumshoe uncovering the truth behind some grisly murder. It’s been twisted and shaped in a few different ways in the realm of video games, such as Return of the Obra Dinn, Paradise Killer, and the Sherlock Holmes games from Frogwares.
Midnight Forge’s Nowhere mixes the fantastical with gritty reality in its own distinct manner. This narrative-driven mystery horror game gives us the bleakly beautiful locales of the Scandinavian outdoors and draws from Norse folklore. But it’s still fundamentally about solving a mystery.
Players are put in the shoes of a detective trapped in the forests of Norway while searching for a group of missing tourists. That task becomes somewhat secondary, with an omnipresent threat of something else lurking in the woods. Can the detective find the missing tourists and survive something that is much bigger than them?
While Nowhere is narrative-driven, it doesn’t shy away from its detective side and chucks in some atmospheric, slow-burn horror for good measure. Its structure is a semi-open environment with clear points of interest. You’ll collect clues, take photographs of possible evidence, and try to figure things out on a planning board as you go. The sleuthing so far seems to be fairly simple but makes the usual narrative adventure note reading more integral to the experience. It’s tough to say exactly how deep the rabbit hole goes on this side of the game, but for now, it offers a bit of intrigue and depth to exploration.
Early on, the forest setting captures the mood of isolated gloom. Even with a little context on the game, it gives you the feeling of being dropped into unfamiliar surroundings and situations. While you do feel somewhat alone in these haunting early moments, there’s a clear feeling something else is out there, and Nowhere gives you just enough time to soak in the foreboding atmosphere before it starts to reveal its creepy hand.
Horror games set in the woods, much like horror movies set in the woods, need to utilize the setting properly to really drive home the horror. Just being in the forest isn’t enough, it should tap into something primal. Nowhere does this in an interesting way by utilizing Norse mythology in its story. The creepy moments in the demo don’t massively tap into that, but I think that has more to do with the perils of showcasing a narrative-driven game in a small slice. On the surface, it’s a tad generic in its terrible sights and sounds, but I feel the Nordic flavor behind it could shine through as you get further into the game.
But what I can tell already is that this is a game dedicated to atmosphere and slow-build tension. In my time with Nowhere, it never exploded into life or tried reeling off half-hearted jump scares. Sometimes the power in horror is just seeing something, not knowing how to react, and anticipating something bad. There are moments in Nowhere that capture that, and these are its richest examples of horror.
Not that it’s all that kind of horror. Things shift and change, and the slightly passive nature of the forest is turned on its head. This is where the Survival Horror tag kicks in. Nowhere changes gear and becomes something frantic. There’s a story behind this that obviously comes later. While I’m not totally sold on the run, hide, fight concept here, the underlying mystery should help smooth things over.
I’m intrigued to see where Midnight Forge takes this Nordic detective horror adventure in the full-fat release of Nowhere. Putting a mythology spin on survival horror is a good choice, and some detective work getting thrown into the pot should help spice things up further.
You can find No Where on Steam.
