The Night Shift has a fine enough premise but doesn’t offer anything new.
The whole ‘creatures move when you aren’t looking’ thing has been done an awful lot in recent years. I couldn’t say when the trope first appeared, but it’s often linked to that Dr Who episode about the Weeping Angels. Look away and you’re going to be chased by monsters, but they freeze the second you look back. I’ve played a fair few horror games in my time, so it’s something I’ve seen in more than a couple of games. Here we have The Night Shift, which does exactly this but in a department store using mannequins, although realistically that’s all the game has to offer.
You’re a new hire at said department store, working as the seemingly lone night shift worker. Each night you’ll turn up, clock on, and be given a list of tasks to complete before you can go home. These are pretty menial, from repairing breaker boxes to checking the fire alarms, but for some reason the mannequins never seem to stay where they are. Some of them behave, others don’t, and others still want to kill you when you aren’t looking. Go to work, complete your duties, and get out before something terrible happens.
It’s a trite premise, but one that’s simple enough to be enjoyable if you focus solely on the gameplay side of things. No one else seems to know anything about the mannequins, and the day shift staff notes you find lying around don’t reference them either. Maybe you’re cursed, maybe the store is, or maybe it’s not worth thinking about too much.
The first tutorial night was simple enough, but the second took a lot more effort. It seems that there are a number of extra objectives around the area that you can find beyond the basic ones you are given by your employer. By reading notes left lying around, you can gain extra objectives to complete. This is what I mean by the second night taking me a lot longer as I went around finding all sorts of notes and just stacking up objectives that I went on to complete. The nights after this were far shorter, with only a couple of simple jobs to do.
Making things trickier are the mannequins that at first simply stand around. Some of them are active, whilst others are aggressive but it won’t be clear which are which until they actually become active. Your objectives will funnel you in certain directions which will often force you past a large number of mannequins and you’ll be attacked rather quickly if you don’t listen out for the sound cues. Credit where it’s due, the sounds are quite creepy, almost sounding like bones snapping and cracking in all sorts of different directions until you turn around to see a store dummy inches from you with its arms outstretched.
At first, this is quite effective as you’ll regularly end up with multiple enemies in an area that you need to keep constant track of. It doesn’t take long for you to figure out how to shepherd them into a position where they are at worst a limited threat. The nights I played through had very little freedom of movement to the point that even in larger areas I was cordoned off into a few paths. This means that you lose the risk of being attacked from anywhere as it takes very little to position the mannequins so you can see them all at once.
The real problem though is the sheer number of bugs I came across. Visual ones like mannequins appearing out of thin air or notes floating in space were annoying but easy enough to overlook. One where the mannequin movement noise continued regardless of any mannequins being nearby was irritating though. Far more egregious was the fact that I couldn’t progress past night five simply because the game kept crashing. Reinstalls and deleting saves did nothing to rectify this, so as it stands there isn’t a great deal more to add about The Night Shift, simply because I wasn’t able to see it.
What was there was fine enough though. It’s a pretty by the numbers horror game that doesn’t really do anything you haven’t seen elsewhere. I liked the setting for it, and I think if it were more open rather than hemming you in with shopping trolleys then the threat would feel much more pronounced. The inclusion of some sort of highlight for objects of interest may be useful too, as trying to spot keycards in the cluttered environments wasn’t always the easiest. It’s not an easy recommendation though, especially considering the number of bugs. Perhaps when it gets fixed — something that I expect will happen due to the dev being active on the forums — then it will be more worth a look, but based on this preview build I’d give it a miss.
The Night Shift is available now on PC.
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