At Dead of Night

At Dead of Night
Developer(s)	Baggy Cat
Publisher(s)	Baggy Cat
Director(s)
Producer(s)
Designer(s)	Tim Follin
Programmer(s)
Artist(s)
Writer(s)
Composer(s)	Tim Follin
Series
Engine
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	19 November 2020
Genre(s)	Survival horror, Adventure, Puzzle
Mode(s)	Single-player
Cabinet
Arcade system
CPU
Sound
Display

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At Dead of Night is an indie survival horror FMV video game developed by video game music composer Tim Follin and released on Steam on 19 November 2020. The game's story follows Maya, a student trapped in a hotel owned by Jimmy Hall, whose background she must investigate in order to escape. The gameplay uses a point-and-click format and has the player find items around the hotel and questioning ghosts in specific locations about them to advance the story, all while hiding from Jimmy, who will attempt to attack the player.

Gameplay

The player controls Maya by clicking on the different sections available to move around the hotel or look around. Being a point-and-click FMV game, all the game's graphics are stored in a video file that the game skips through. The video itself is a combination of computer-generated images with real actors.

Maya can enter any unlocked room, inside of which she can find different items. Some items she can only ask the spirits about, while others she can pick up and use; such as the compass, which points to spirit locations; the mirror, which gives the player a clue as to where to go next or what to talk to the spirits about in order to progress; the store room keys, allowing Maya to enter them and travel across the floor more quickly; or the deadlock keys, which allow her to lock herself in a room for safety or, if used from the outside, to temporarily lock Jimmy in.

The protagonist can talk to spirits using the Ghost & Spirit Voice Receiver. To do this, she must enter a "high energy state", which causes the spirit to "manifest", triggering a cutscene showing them performing an action from the story. She can then use the device to ask them for their name and what she has just seen, as well as about any found items. Then, she must make a connection, usually involving the scene she has just seen with an item. If successful, the spirit will explain the connection and move to another location, prompting Maya to go there to view the next scene. If incorrect, the spirit will say that it "doesn't know" and, if she continues to choose incorrect connections, its voice will become static and it will eventually disappear. Once Maya sees how a character dies, she will talk to them on the receiver for the last time and obtain an achievement, completing their story.

Throughout the story, Jimmy will try to attack Maya. In most cases, he can be heard or seen in the corridors, but eventually he may hide behind a column or around a turn to surprise Maya. To avoid him, the player can listen to the volume of his voice, look through the spy glass inside the rooms or call out to him to control where he is going. Sometimes, he may come into rooms, and Maya is prompted to quickly hide in the wardrobe or in the bathroom. The bathroom has a risk of getting her found and attacked, and although the wardrobe is safe, Jimmy may hide inside the bathroom waiting to surprise her when she tries to leave the room. If the player is caught, Jimmy will hit Maya with his bat, knocking her out. Maya then wakes up in a random room, having lost her spirit box, which she must go pick up again from a store room, as well as some or all of her keys. There is no limit to the number of times the player can be knocked out by Jimmy, but there is an achievement for completing the game with zero hits.

The hotel has five different floors. The lower ground (LG), the ground floor (G) and the stairs are safe, but in floors 1, 2 and 3 the player is at risk of being attacked. Spirits can manifest on both safe and dangerous floors. When travelling between dangerous floors, there is a preset time before Jimmy arrives there, which shortens as the player progresses through the story.

After the end of the story, the game saves for one last time and the player must help Maya's friends escape safely. Maya must unlock each of the rooms and enter them, then tell them to safely get to the ground floor. However, if Maya is attacked, she will return to the beginning of the sequence.

Plot

Set in Scarborough, England, the story follows a group of friends who decide to go camping to attend a music festival, until adverse weather conditions force them to book into the remote Sea View Hotel. Upon arrival, the hotel's owner, Jimmy Hall, invites Maya, the protagonist, to his comedy show, starring a psychopath named Hugo Punch played by himself. Maya declines the offer and goes to bed, upsetting Jimmy. Following her refusal, Jimmy begins to hear an alter ego of himself from a mirror, which incites him to take revenge by attacking the group.

Well into the night, Maya is awoken by a distant scream. After leaving her room and seeing Jimmy putting one of her friends to sleep in the distance, she panics and tries to return to her room, only to realise that she has been locked out. She takes the lift to the ground floor and, unable to use the phone due to poor signal, she quickly finds a spare master key. As she is about to leave, her attention is drawn to a loudspeaker labelled Ghost & Spirit Voice Receiver with voices urging her to investigate Jimmy's past in order to escape.

Once the game transitions to the gameplay, Maya heads to the lower ground, where she finds the spirit of a ten-year-old girl named Amy Bell. A former hotel guest, she claims a "boy called Jimmy" had locked her down there and stolen her money. Later, Jimmy sets fire to her plush toy, burning Amy's hand. The girl tries to call a doctor, but Jimmy threatens her with a sword and claims he has medicine to cure the pain in her hand. However, this medicine, actually a bottle of whiskey, causes drunk Amy to fall down the stairs from the top floor and die.

After Amy's death, Maya finds another spirit, a man in a suit knocking on a door on the second floor. Following that tragic event, Jimmy's mother, Rose Hall, had called Doctor Bose, a clinical psychiatrist, to talk to him and find out what happened to him. Bose discovers that Jimmy was killing animals and realises that he needs to work on his empathy skills, so the doctor asks him to try to make him a sandwich. Later on, however, Bose is seen coughing up blood in the bathroom sink, as Jimmy had put broken glass in the sandwich. Realising that he is facing a worse case than expected, he chases Jimmy around the hotel to attempt to medicate him with Diazepam, but Jimmy tells Rose that the doctor had beaten him with a paddle to do it. Worried that Rose will believe him, the doctor manages to convince her that he was lying and expects Jimmy to start complying. Instead, however, Jimmy makes up another lie and accuses the doctor of molesting him. Dr. Bose is then seen on the ground floor with sounds of the police outside about to arrest him. Overwhelmed, he enters the hotel one night while on bail, grabs a rope and ties it to a running lift, hanging himself.

Following Bose's suicide, Maya finds another spirit in the third floor, a man named Harvey, trying to convince Rose of Jimmy's lies, who ignores him. Harvey, the hotel proprietor, had found Jimmy's scrapbook, containing a collection of newspaper clippings about abuse cases, with one of them being identical to the one he had accused Bose of and that led to his arrest and suicide. Jimmy, displeased by Harvey's discovery, begins to set traps for him. He finds Harvey's broken heater and plugs it into the mains, which ends up electrocuting him. Harvey, in response, grabs a cricket bat and enters Jimmy's room, smashing his television and video game consoles. In retaliation, Jimmy places a crossbow in Harvey's room, set to fire when the door is opened and shooting him in the leg. After returning from the hospital, Harvey learns that Jimmy is hiding in the basement and locks him in. And although he was sure that Jimmy could not cause any more damage there, he manages to start a fire in the hotel which, although contained, resulted in the loss of many materials and Harvey's outrage. Unable to think straight, Harvey finds an old gun and starts looking for Jimmy to threaten him to leave, but Jimmy manages to sneak up behind him and stabs him in the chest with a blunt letter opener.

Maya heads to the second floor, where she meets the fourth and final spirit, Rose Hall. She explains that Jimmy had been released under the right of self-defence, and argues that he changed, starting to help around the hotel. Jimmy launches his comedy show, Hugo Punch, proving very successful and attracting many guests to the hotel. The hotel's benefits continue to increase, but one day Rose spots Jimmy shouting at a mirror. Confused, she eventually realises that Jimmy "was not in control anymore". Jimmy, submerged in Hugo's character, begins insulting his audience every night. A guest calls him out, and Jimmy ties her up and locks her in a room, asserting that it was a joke. The guest is found by Rose and let free, and tells the newspapers about it, who begin looking for Jimmy. However, Jimmy, unable to remember any of it, becomes depressed and attempts suicide, so Rose decides to tell him "the truth". Outside the story, Maya is taken to a newly unlocked room, the basement store, containing Jimmy's birth certificate. In it, she discovers what Rose told Jimmy: that Hugo Hall was actually his father, and that he had beaten him continuously from when he was born, for two years. Maya then sees the scene of Hugo screaming at a crying child Jimmy, followed by Rose beating him to his death with a bat. Rose had then buried him in the basement. After Rose mistakenly believes that telling Jimmy would make matters better, the latter rushes off to find Hugo's grave. Rose, unable to accept what she has done, sets her body on fire and kills herself.

Maya thus learns that the Jimmy who has been following her throughout the story is being controlled by Hugo. She confronts him and tells him that she now knows his story, to which Jimmy responds by inviting her to the basement, to Hugo's grave. Down there, Jimmy tells Maya that they are meant to be together and that he cannot allow her to leave, and Maya quickly locks him up temporarily and grabs six keys: to the rooms in which her five friends are locked and to the exit of the hotel. In the last section of the game, Maya enters each room and instructs them to get safely to the ground floor. After all the friends and Maya have escaped, they escape from the hotel at dawn.

The ending scene depicts Jimmy still shouting for Maya, who is no longer there. Then, Jimmy's usual personality is seen crying in a corner, begging him to stop, to which his alter ego replies that Jimmy will continue to act in this way, because Hugo will always be in charge.

Cast

• Chloé Booyens as Maya
• Huld Martha as Jimmy Hall
• Joanna Bond as Rose Hall
• Karl Haynes as Harvey
• Rohit Gokani as Dr. Bose
• Daisy Follin as Amy Bell

Reception

At Dead of Night received a 4/5 score from Hey Poor Player, who admired the game's atmosphere and story and complimented its good use of FMV, labelling it "one of the few FMV games [they have] really seen get it right." However, they criticised its sometimes flawed sound cues and its dark video and the demotivation from Jimmy stealing items when he attacks the player. TheGamer praised its lack of blaring music and repetitive jumpscares and its use of camera work and physical actors.

On Steam, user reviews of the game are listed as "very positive", with 94% recommendations out of 1880 reviews.

Sequel

The developer has confirmed that a sequel to the game is in the works, and which will feature Maya and Jimmy's characters.

See also

• Tim Follin
• Contradiction: Spot the Liar!

External links

• Developer website
• At Dead of Night at Metacritic

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