Noctropolis Reviews

Gonna party like it's 1994! I like games where a character enters another world. Be it a computer, a cartoon or yes, a comic book. So I really enjoyed the idea. It is not a great game but it is entertaining. Some puzzles are extremely annoying though. The end credits are way too long. We don't need that.

This is an isekai story from before isekai even existed as a term. You play a horribly depressed miserable comic book man that gets sucked into a comic book world. Then you save the day as not-Batman. That's the whole game. It took me about 3 hours to get through it, and I'll be honest I was using a walkthrough for about 70% of it. I gave it a good try, but this is one of those classic point and click adventures where you have pixel hunting, useless items, and even useless locations! Many dialogue encounters have to be done 'the right way' to progress successfully, and if you mess up sometimes you just die. Now, to be fair the right answer is often quite apparent, but sometimes it really isn't and you won't really know where you went wrong, since you can enter a dialogue tree where every answer is a dead end, and you picked wrong at the start. Yeah. So this game has all the problems of a 90s point and click adventure game. So what's the good parts then? Well, the game is pretty short, which is a bonus. As mentioned, this is a 3 hour game if you're just going through it at an easy pace, following a walkthrough, enjoying the story. The story is not disinteresting, really, but it is very stock in a lot of ways, but it all takes place in a kind of weird world which I think does a lot to make it... interesting. There's lots of stuff that's just hinted at. Noctropolis has pretty good art and backgrounds most of the time, and while I think none of the digitized actors are really taking anything seriously and some actors give shockingly bad performances, the game's tone actually somewhat effectively rides a line of being serious and at times pretty dark, without being too heavy. There's some silly dialogue and some funny text boxes here and there which give you a laugh, and eases any sort of tension you might be feeling. As I mentioned, it's an isekai. Your sad, pathetic, ex-wife man who looks like a nerd gets turned into DARKSHEER, the legendary hero of the night. He even has a utility belt. Then there's like five bad guys you have to take out and then one final bad guy. There's really not a lot more to the story, since this is a game that was clearly more concerned, for the most part, with just providing an adventure game experience with maybe some wish fulfilment for desperate nerds who like comic books. Yeah. So in that sense at least this game aged a bit poorly, since just from my description there, you should be able to tell that this is one of those 90s properties where they have a very stereotypical vision of what a nerd is. I should note too, I dunno who the writers on this were, but I think they did fairly well on this game. Again, not a complex story, or anything. Not THAT dedicated to concepts of setup and payoff, but there's some in there. It sort of comes with the design of the adventure game that certain things are going to be in there. There's some okay character work. I think that one of the big things I liked though was the dialogue for your character? I mentioned that the game has dialogue trees that have some options that you can just tell are incorrect, and some that noticeably feel correct. One of the things I noticed about a lot of the 'correct' options in dialogue trees, is... the game seems to want you to pick the cheesiest 'action hero' dialogue you see. I kind of like that. I sort of like that the game seems to want you to play by its rules and it's up to you to adapt to them. It also makes sense somewhat with the character of your guy that you are playing as, because he should be able to solve weird puzzles like this by just being very familiar, himself, with the trappings of the world. It also sort of ties in with the self-insert isekai type stuff since ostensibly, the player themselves can easily slip into that role by also probably being interested in comic books, since they are buying a game about comic books, probably being interested in nerdy things like adventure games, since they are buying a game about adventure games... there's something there, I think, I don't know how much of that is intended, but I think it's neat. I think too that as an isekai it's more interesting and immersive when you take an active role in it, such as in this game, than a passive interaction, such as in a novel or something like that where you are just watching someone else go through it. The game has a bit of nudity to it in a couple places, but it all feels pretty skeevy. This is a sleazy game, in a lot of ways, and it feels exploitative. It's gross enough that it's not really all that erotic. It has like three or four cat fights where the girls of the game beat on each other, kind of. The game obviously has a hard time even rendering two characters interacting let alone fighting, so these are almost more verbal than anything, but still. Right at the start you get to read basically an entire comic book which, I thought was kind of neat. The art quality was sort of all over the place though and while some pages looked great, some other pages were like, this is CLEARLY not the same artist? What happened? Where'd he go? Did they lose an artist and just have to make do on their own? Really puzzling stuff, but it's not something that really bothered me... merely just an interesting observation. I think overall I would recommend the game though, since, I think I generally liked playing it, there were some moments where I was kind of impressed or made me go 'wow'. There's plenty of nice art to look at. And I sort of liked the pulpy comic book setting. It was a generally good experience, and there was nothing too frustrating. It's not really a very difficult game, except for all the usual adventure game problems. The only problem is, I don't know who I would recommend it TO. The list of people I can think of that would actually want to spend the time to play this is pretty narrow. But, if it sounds interesting, give it a try. Oh also, this is a great port. Ran great for me. I played on Linux, but I am sure it's great on Windows too.

TLDR: if you're looking for a fun FMV game from the 90's - this isn't it. The game is frustrating, disjointed and underdeveloped. Main issues are: -underdeveloped story and characters -unsatisfying and disjointed story -nonsensical puzzles artificially padding out the play time and frustrating the player -numerous timed events with no guidance on what to do -no clues, tips or guidance -no quality of life - eg. frustrating action wheel, objects don't shine/aren't obvious -bad acting... really bad acting -no humour -very linear / no choices -dialogue responses don't matter -very short - low value for money