Nowhere Preview (PC) – Detective Noir-dic
Detective shows are a dime a dozen in the modern age. However, I don’t think you’ll have come across a Nordic inspired detective game before. I definitely hadn’t, until Nowhere creeped up and arrived on my PC for a preview demo. In total, I’ve spent an hour with the first-person horror-detective mash-up and there are elements I thoroughly like, and others I don’t like nearly as much.
Setting, atmosphere and premise are all novel, eerie and captivating. Unfortunately, interacting with the game, the survival-horror aspects and the technical performance are alarmingly less promising. We’ll get into the nitty gritty in a moment, but the core idea of Nowhere is wonderful. Provided it gets the time to flesh out its ideas, it could be quite something. But it’ll need a fair bit more time to achieve that something.
Nowhere To Hide, But Somewhere To Run?
Like any good detective media, the intrigue is in the mystery. For the preview build, we’re dropped at the edge of a Nordic forest. Fog envelops your surroundings, the only distant sight is twisted trees and mangled fauna. In effect, Nowhere is a walking simulator through a modern Slender: The Eight Pages-like woods, with some Nordic architecture sprinkled around.
You walk or sprint through to various landmarks, collect diary pages, photos and random items, piecing together the quizzical story. Four inquisitive paranormal exploration teens have gone missing, your job is to find them… and escape yourself. To that end, you use collected items and the notes scattered about to solve ritual puzzles. Fairly straightforward, but is it any fun?
In terms of exploration, the demo build is decent. The landmarks have some solid historical accuracy, while the ritual based puzzles are interesting enough. For actually engaging with the game, it’s a little less positive. Movement isn’t always the best, with elevation causing a lot of collision issues. Moreover, interacting with objects is fiddly and awkward.
Notes have some translation issues which makes understanding them a bit more complicated too. Which isn’t ideal, given puzzles are how Nowhere seems to want to progress. Upon death or after activating the ritual in the demo, you have to manually input words or phrases to answer questions, which is a nice gameplay quirk from the usual formula. However, I couldn’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed with it all.
Draugr’d Through The Mud
Periodically as you’re wandering around collecting and solving, you’ll notice the forest turn red, very red. Like something out of War of the Worlds, the Scandinavian influence oxymoronically comes alive, as the Draugr rise. It happened roughly three times during my brief time with the demo, and it was probably the weakest element of Nowhere, sadly.
The creatures have a suitably creepy design and shambling animation, but they’re slow, far too slow. In fact, hold down sprint (which is unlimited) and you’ve basically won. There’s no real threat nor stakes here, which undercuts the horror completely. I’m hopeful that the full release will expand on this idea more, as if it’s just this repeated throughout, I fear it just doesn’t add much value to the game.
The Draugr aren’t the only terrors currently plaguing Nowhere, either. To their credit, this is an early build and the developer is pushing out a lot of updates, even during my brief time with the demo. I feel confident a lot of problems will be fixed, but the technical state of the game is… worrying. Clipping issues, items animating through walls, multiple hard crashes, a broken case board mechanic, the list is extensive.
Coupled with the aforementioned gameplay problems, Nowhere feels like it would be better suited as an eerie, creepy experience type of game rather than a traditional horror title. Like I said, much of this can hopefully be fine-tuned and updated to make it more engaging, but the preview hasn’t quite sold me on these parts of the game yet.
Scandi-nay-vian?
My initial hour of Nowhere was a real mixed bag of fortunes. I really like the environment and the Slender-esque sense of unease the colour palette and haunted setting evoke. The quirky takes on the detective elements are interesting as well. It’s a shame I’m not really sold on the rest of the game thus far, but I do think there’s hope for this Nordic inspired horror piece.
Give it some time to complete its ritual, and I reckon Nowhere will be able to deliver a real niche appetizer to quench the hunger for a lonely, isolating discomfort fest. There’s plenty of technical problems and gameplay wrinkles to balance out, but given the rate of updates being poured into it, I’m fairly confident they’ll be addressed.
At the very least, Nowhere provides the Silent Hill and Slenderman vibes that have been missing in recent years. That it’s in a Nordic setting that successfully emulates a haunted forest, only makes it more enticing. The Draugrs may not be the threat they should be just yet, but perhaps Nowhere just needs a bit more blood infused to achieve its lethal ritual.
Nowhere currently has no release date, but will be available on PC (preview platform) and you can wishlist via Steam. Additionally, on August 15th the demo will become available via Steam.
Developer: Midnight Forge
Publisher: Midnight Forge
Disclaimer: In order to complete this preview, we were provided with a promotional preview build of the game.
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