I tend to land on Martin Scorsese’s side of the superhero craze—“The point is amusement park movies,” he said in 2019—and so I admit to going in Marvel’s Midnight Sun feel rude. Tactical role-playing game, that is delay twice before finally landing on the current December 2 release date, coming from XCOM creator of the Firaxis Games, but even that association of dignity is not enough to overshadow what I find too noisy. Super hero shiny. I was wrong, though.
In amusement park terms: oh boy! This game is joy! You mainly control The Hunter, the child of sexy female demon Lilithcome back to prowl later Evil paramilitary group Hydra revives and set her free on New York City. In response, the Avengers and the gothic group of young wizards, the Midnight Suns, have brought you back after centuries of rest to destroy your extremely evil mother for a second time. You return to the Priory, an ancient magical castle in Salem to train, pass the portals, and chat with your new superhero friends who have absolutely no idea what you should do.
The game is a bit like a crammed spice rack, but the game’s turn-based combat is what convinced me to invest. You can play both story-focused and unrelated optional missions and pit your team against Hydra forces or special enemies like molten aliens, Venom slaves. Each of your heroes has a few cards in their move set that correspond to different attacks, such as a whip that knocks the villain to the ground or a hard blow to the stomach, but a typical match requires a lot. more strategic than just picking your strongest penalty card.
The cards cost or give you “hero points”, which you can use for flashy cutscenes or use for environmental attacks, such as stuffing your fists into boxes. Flashing electricity to explode. You must use hero points carefully to pursue your goals, which can be as general as defeating all enemies or as specific as disarming a helicopter in three turns.
As you progress in the game and level up or tweak your heroes’ move sets, battles become more complicated, with armor-clad enemies holding powerful cards until you kill them. knock them down, passive attacks you need to take into account, and Venom hurling giant shards of metal at him. all your good people for some reason. The battle looks good (though I find the game’s graphics to be nothing short of amazing), bursts with box office explosions and hunger fires, and completing a successful match makes me feel pretty smart and satisfied.
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I spent most of my sixish hours of game time on fighting, but Midnight Suns has a lot more to offer. There’s a character creator, hero customization, and bedroom decor. There are mushrooms to forage, clubs to join, and gifts to collect and give. At one point, Tony Stark focused his weepy baby blues on me and asked for my help because, as the game pointed out, “the life of a superhero is complicated and sometimes they could use advice.”
I know that all these elements (and I haven’t even mentioned the skill upgrades, the tarot card collectibles, the cinnabar hell hound you pet to earn arcane knowledge, etc.) sound like clutter, but in my brief time with the game, I felt like they flowed together as natural, conceivable parts of daily life in the sprawling stone Abbey. You’ve been brought out of a 300-year-long coma, you travel through space-melting portals to fight soldiers alongside super people and super witches. So, sure, why shouldn’t a typical day involve cards with the vampire Blade and a “rare swimsuit” as a reward?
It’s a little stupid. It’s fun, but it’s still a Marvel game and a little stupid. The Hunter, who you can put in one of two body types but is referred to as “they” or “them,” starts the game wearing a Joan of Arc-ish armor set, but then you find out that their last diary entry was written in 1703. The game is meant to wander the “darker corners of the Marvel Universe,” its Steam description says, but that actually means uninspiring, PG-13 Marvel comedy (“Sacred or not, geometry be damned,” The Hunter says once as part of, I guess, an anti-math stand-up set) and opaque references to demonology that won’t spook you unless you aren’t actually old enough for those PG-13 jokes.
For me, someone who hasn’t engaged in Marvel comics or movies seriously since I myself required a parent’s permission, a lot of Midnight Suns’ dense lore sidestepped me. I knew who the main guys were, like Iron Man and Doctor Strange, but abstruse references to “Agatha” and “Blood“meaning nothing. I imagine midnight sun‘ story will appeal to fans of Marvel’s lesser known heroes, characters like Mutant Magik and Ghost Rider flaming skullbut while the detailed dialogue options try to make their history accessible, I don’t bite.
That feels fine, because there’s so much else to play with. This game is summer on Coney Island, crowded, sometimes, with kitsch, but it turns out I don’t mind taking selfies.
