Could You Make It Through The Night?

You start as a gas station worker in Shift at Midnight, trying to pay the medical bills for your cat. You face a regular night shift that turns into a fight for survival as mysterious doppelgangers start showing up acting like humans. While at first, the task seems rather easy and the longer the night shift goes on, the more difficult it becomes to determine what is going on.

Doppelgangers can mimic the employees and you have to carefully consider every character. Check their appearance and movements. As well as talking to them to see if their stories match what is in the file on the computer to figure out who to trust.

However, if you fail and one doppelganger manages to escape the gas station things will get worse, and you will have to board up the entire building, plant traps and try to stay alive. While the story in this game is not particularly long and doesn’t explore its characters and world in depth. 

It encourages you to try to figure everything out as you survive another night shift and the secret regarding the origins of clones and their intentions makes the story quite interesting to follow. 

The gameplay in Shift At Midnight is focused on surviving the night shift while performing gas station tasks and detecting clones who show up throughout the night and our initial tasks include serving the customers as well as monitoring the station but things will get more difficult as suspicious customers start to show up throughout your shift.

The main goal is to detect and figure out any doppelgangers by paying attention to every customer at the station and noting down all unusual features. You need to compare their appearances and behaviors by using readily available data about them on the computer and questioning them to see if they tell you the truth.

All of your attention will be required because letting only one doppelganger slip away will increase the level of danger during the rest of your night shift as you will be forced to barricade up the entrances, set traps and watch out for any dangers.

While your main tasks include serving a lot of customers and doing everything you usually do, the main feature of the game is its need to constantly change all of your focus from working to checking if your customers are human or not.

The graphical side of Shift At Midnight simply cannot boast anything majorly spectacular in contrast to other demanding horror games, but it serves the game’s core concept quite well. The graphics of Shift At Midnight have a retro style, which contributes to its general aura of this game and provides immersion of distortion when it comes to locations and its 1990s setting.

The game does not feature any complex and intricate visuals, but thanks to the use of dim lighting, shadows, and eerie character designs, even such common environments become frightening to explore at the dead of the night.

Instead of using sophisticated graphics to create a sense of fear, the game creates an impression of something being off-putting through the visual design which adds to its growing feeling of paranoia that you just can’t shake off.

Simple textures and the character designs contribute to the overall feeling of dread and unease these doppelgangers give as they look almost human except for slight distortions, and sometimes you can not even tell.