NightCry: The Biggest Trainwreck in Survival Horror History
Video Overview & Insights
Hifumi Kono, the creator of the highly-influential Clock Tower series, revisited his horror roots in 2016 with the release of NightCry. Spoilers: the game isn’t very good. Today we’re going to explore the game’s rocky gameplay and even rockier development history.
I played this game and I had diarrhea for 2 weeks...coincidence??? I think not
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26:20 things like that happen in real life. No closure or good endings. Look at nier and drakengard. You may not like the writing, but that doesn’t dismiss that stuff like that happens and can paint even survivors as horrible people
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(she runs like she's about to poop herself)
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If I can give one compliment to the game: If you ignore the blinking textures and badly animated woman, I think Harry's death scene was really good. There's the camera angle where we can just barely see him getting pulled further into the machine, how slow he gets shredded, the way his body ends up all contorted in the drink slot, and the slight twitching of his legs afterwards. Sure, the premise was a bit absurd, but the way they executed it was cinematically sickening. They did a lot to sidestep the inherent silliness of a vending machine death, and I think they did a really good job. Only criticism I have is that he didn't really scream in a way befitting of the situation, like he really should have been louder or more frantic. But I know I can't expect good voice acting from a game like this.
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Man, NightCry sucks.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro
I find funny how NudeMaker simply vanish from the face of Earth the moment they publish the horribly broken Vita ports of NightCry, which already is 7 years ago at this point.
But like really, if you look at info about them online is impossible to find anything. Their website was already dead by 2015 with Nightcry itself being the last thing they publish there, and they don't have other social media aside of the accounts for this game.
As far we know the company still exist, but they don't seem to do anything.
So my only guess is Hifumi Kono run with the money.
4:55 - Gameplay
10:55 - Presentation
Just played the game with the help of a walkthrough to spend as little time as possible on it. Well, it was somehow interesting to see a clock tower like game again, but damn what a mess. I think the project was doomed from the start. Either they should have made classic 2D graphics like the first one to have more leeway on the rest, or they should have tried to find an external publisher to help them make a better game. Seeing Scissorman again was fun, but the story doesn't make an iota of sense. Between Jerome being kidnapped and sent to the island, yet getting back in like an hour to meet Rooney again, Leonard's fate making zero sense given there's nothing in lore explaining why did the cult treated him like that, and Monica somehow ending lower on the boat after escaping toward the deck, and so on ...
12:28 - Music
13:50 - Puzzles and progression
Nightcry: Is terrible
Tango to Clock tower ghost head: maybe I judged you too harshly
17:43 - Story (SPOILERS)
33:18 - Kickstarter development
holy shit this is an ugly game have they never animated any characters at all before?
50:17 - Outro
MUSIC USED IN VIDEO (IN ORDER):
How on earth can a human being play night cry 3 times? That would be like asking someone to play Kings Quest 3 blind with no guide 3 times
Leaf of Chaos - Battlefield – Drakengard 3
Hall of Loneliness – Clock Tower 3
So something that immediately stuck out to me when you mentioned the prosthetic hand and eye was that it was likely a reference to the Hand and Eye of Vecna from Dnd. Seeing that the hand has (what looks like) a floating d20 above the thumb, I think that's a pretty clear reference... which gives at least some justification for why the mc would think to remove their own eye and put the prosthetic one in - as that's the only way to use it. Still really weird that there isn't any explanation as to what it is, or what its significance to the story is, aside from being an easter egg of sorts.
Scissorman - Clock Tower 2
Silent Circus – Silent Hill 4: The Room
I'm just starting the video and Monica's model and animations look certifiably UNHINGED, she looks like she's out of Xanax, I already love her so much
The Day of Night – Silent Hill 2
After Rock Attack - Resident Evil (1996)
Youve just gotta love stories where things happen for the sake of happening huh
Save theme - Resident Evil Remake
Recorder 2007 (UFO ending theme) - Silent Hill: The Arcade
Live on Walnuts - Sonic Shuffle
Zanarkand Ruins - Final Fantasy X-2
27:43 I dunno why something about this just resonates with me. The tone, just everything. Love it. Wish I could play it anytime I'm super incredulous about something.
Amethyst Princess - Xblaze Code: Embryo
More User Perspectives
@28:00: Lynyrd Skinnedyrd 😅
@hermes_job_observer144@4:20: i hope that's a subtle reference to one of the best ps1 horror games, "Juggernaut"!
@hermes_job_observer144Clocktower 3 traumatised me as a child. Scariest game I'd played...and hard too
@jimmylittle9393I'm curious, you mentioned Campfire as the Japanese version of Kickstarter. Was that $300k total accumulated across both platforms, or did they ask for and receive $300k from each platform, for a sum total of $600k?
@nakayaninjai kickstarted this game when i was younger, and i still haven't played it. somehow, still not even the worst game i've backed on KS (mighty no 9, and the never delivered project phoenix). it's projects like this where i stopped supporting anyone on KS after being scammed several times on project that never came to fruition or just were jank like this one.
@ChrisatMITYou've seen a goofier run cycle now 😂
@beckyginger3432"noo" 🥱.. "waaait"
@cccantv6457Oh man. As someone who LOVES terrible/"terrible" games, I might've given this a try at a steep sale price. But, now knowing more about the background, I refuse to. That "collector's edition" stuff looks way worse than the small bonus I got for Demon Souls (back when it first came out in ps3, idk about the new version).
@mikshanamaelevia3787300k sounds like a lot to you or me, but for a multi person multi year project that's nothing.
@enfisu58646:38
Hang on... I've seen that symbol associated with that colour somewhere...
* GASP * HOMESTU-
6:35 There's something so ironic about Capcom wanting the reboot game to do so well and then backfiring so poorly in its heyday that they had to sell off some things and his model, but ya know, they can't call him Dante or have the same story or anything like that but even so he's so far removed from the mainline Dante that he could easily enough be his own character
and it's now one of my favourite niche gaming facts ever
300k was not even remotely enough, yeah
It sounds like a lot of money, but it isn't. There's a reason even AA projects cost millions to make
Wow that Rooney subplot reminds me of my old "friends"
@notoriousgoblin83That walk cycle in heels.
Is she hitting the griddy?
0:42 why'd that guy on the slab looking like Ron Weasley?
@wrgirlie86So this one really is "featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series", huh?
But no Knuckles sadly enough
9:40 is literally a Mr Bean move. 😂
@ForgottenWalrusI LOVE NIGHTCRY
@Lobotomy18I would've rather had a NightCry that was much lower in scale, a 2D point and click, minimal voice acting, didn't need among THE BEST artists and composers in the industry. Hell, it would've likely given the devs more in the budget to innovate on the Clock Tower concept in some way and write a more coherent story.
@TariqyosVery happily distracted by the FFX-2 music at 40 minutes in
@jessicaw8067To be honest, you don’t need to be overly ambitious to run out of budget quickly. Game development is expensive. To have a small team of 4 working full time for 2 years will easily surpass the initial 300k just on salary. Let alone money for assets, licenses, outsourced material, temps, and even backer rewards and marketing. Expedition 33, heralded for having a relatively small development team, spent at least a mil a year, and that’s an impressive feat. Shoestring budgets are usually done by one or two passion developers working essentially for free. I’m not saying some great results couldn’t be done from a relatively small amount of money, and not knowing how far they could go with their Kickstarter money is definitely a problem the developers caused. But with that budget I feel like Night Cry was doomed from the start.
I think it’s fair to call this game a scam as they definitely didn’t fulfill their obligations. However, I doubt anyone took the money and run. The money ran out quickly through the naturally course of development and some people probably even threw in their own money.
I somehow managed to Platinum this on my PSVita, it was rough.
@kd9749INFINITE SPACE MENTIONED!!!! ❤❤
@LuckyLamoura48:33 - I just did.
@FenrissonRandom comment for engagement purposes.
@FenrissonThat voice acting at the end. lol, did he just give up?
@austynslavych8122coming to this video 3 years later and learning that Takashi Shimizu was involved and then hearing everything bad with it. Shimizu's an okay movie and tv director, The Grudge stuck with me for years and Kayako still haunts my nightmares at times to this day- but he is a very bad video game director- He made The Grudge walking sim for the Wii- and...yeah-
@iggyfan11I feel like nightcry kind of phoned in a story that was there to deliver nonsense secenes, especially since it would have been kind of simple to write something like clock tower for that boat. Say you have only one protag, that protag "wins" a cruise and that cruise is actually a group of socialites trying to make up some entertainment for themselves by getting an unstable serial-killer to hunt people on the lower decks, only it spirals out of control (it was never meant to kill so many) and that serial killer seems to have aquired some level of horror-themed magic that came from a curse placed on the boat from the last time this happened (that this is the second time this happened should not be revealed until much later but hinted at early on) placed by the mother over the death of her daughter. This could mean that the daughter (think little girl horror theme) haunts the boat while you have the scissor-man insert chasing you around, meaning you have access to a lot of japanese horror tropes with potential for having the clock tower-esque endings with solving the case or getting the hell off the boat. You could spin the story from there in a lot of directions.
I know I just described the tropiest game ever. But I feel like I could litteraly write the story for this and it would be better than the carcrash on display and I'm a hobbyist author at best.
Nightcry (featuring dante from devil may cry)
@wackwabbit3831All they had to do was get ONE woman they knew to run in heels for them.....
@ellielewis3185There is a game called Amy, it was described as the worst horror game. But this is just terrible. Amy is bad, but it has some shine to stand out
@ininja3206:36 yep, it was funny enough when I saw the Dante model in this game (thinking: the hell are you doing here?) being eaten by a vending machine only made the situation more hilarious.
@Night_Raptor_5991I'm studying this game as a what not to do
@NoxDolore