Nighthawks launched on September 22, and is already reviewing strongly. The RPG, which is available on Steam, comes from the minds of The Curiosity Engine. The indie developer studio only has Nighthawks under their proverbial belt, meaning the studio is in its infancy. Equipped with a passion for creating video games, the small team worked with Wadjet Eye Games to publish this vampire-centric romp with tons of personality.
Steam features a whole host of indie titles worth checking out that aren’t backed by big studios or a massive budget. For what it lacks in big-budget motion-capture and cinematic choreographed scenes seen in some AAA titles, the game makes up for it in spades with its well-written story. Nighthawks proves that indie titles still have a fighting chance against juggernauts when the story is meaningful and interactive. Who doesn’t love vampires?
Nighthawks is a Masterpiece Without All the Fancy Bells & Whistles
Check Out Nighthawks on Steam
Nighthawks is a heavily text-driven vampire RPG that focuses far more on characters, choices, faction relationships, and consequences than cinematic combat spectacle. Players pilot a vampire in a world where the blood-sucking creatures have been exposed to the public. That means no more hiding in the shadows as a bloodthirsty killer. It’s time to go big. With the secret out, players must foster a thriving nightclub titled the Nighthawks while traversing the ever-changing landscape, utilizing everything they have in their arsenal, from fear and seduction to a few supernatural gifts.
Who’s That Character?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
The player is tasked with farming stats by working their way up in society among humans, solving mysteries and making frenemies along the way. The vampire players pick at the top of the game determines what their character will be like, what special powers they wield, and even their blood lineage.
Tailoring a vampire to a specific need is all part of this RPG’s strategy early on, already getting players one step up on the game world’s social ladder.
Like any good RPG, Nighthawks has a stats system where skills can be improved upon by enlisting the help of a companion or equipping specific items. The higher specific stats are, the better they can be wielded to the players’ advantage. If a chosen vampire is more brains than brawn, players are expected to use stats like seduction to get their way. If a vampire is already blessed with a fighting background, upping brawling stats would maybe be the way to go. How you play is up to you.
Since this title is text-driven, the format is quite simple, reading like a visual novel similar to something like Doki Doki Literature Club. Characters are presented with dialogue, choices can be made, and settings are shown in one detailed frame. While this style is likely a result of budget and time constraints, the game does not suffer because of it.
Nighthawks‘ story is the main attraction, setting it apart from anything else in the genre. Every character you meet is equipped with in-depth lore. Talking to the residents of the fictional city of Cradlebridge gives players the ability to uncover some hefty secrets if they dig deep enough. In the game’s first act, players are tasked with playing detective, following a trail, seeing where it leads, and uncovering the juicy truth. It is interesting to see how both humans and vampires interact with each other, given that Cradlebridge is the first integrated city of its kind. As you can imagine, drama festers and heads butt over the whole vampire thing.
See, vampires that live in Cradlebridge must be regulated. They have to carry around ID cards, and they even have their own political committee and a clinic. Stepping into the center of that tension between humans and the vampires, as a vampire, is a unique concept. If players find they need a break from the drama of the main story, there are a ton of side quests available that amp up the horror atmosphere at times while adding more context to the world around them.
At the end of it all, Nighthawks effectively calls into question ‘is being a vampire all that it’s cracked up to be?’
In a recently written article, PC Gamer gave Nighthawks an 89, not surprising given how inventive and unique the story is. I am in the camp that indie titles can get a pass on lacking fancy visuals, as long as the core story, choices, and consequences are meaningful. Players want something that they can sink their teeth into, pun intended, deep-diving into a world that is not their own, regardless of how fancy it is or how big a budget has backed it.
Strong Writing Can Make or Break a Game’s Reception
At the end of the day, a game is meaningless if it is beautiful but lacks a proper story. Indie is not synonymous with bad, something that many gamers still struggle with. Plenty of AAA titles have fallen flat when it comes to creating a narrative that gets audiences invested. A well-thought-out story can either make or break reception, as seen in games like Death Stranding 2 or Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.
Both titles, hailing from the mind of Hideo Kojima, suffer from convoluted storytelling, with writing that feels fantastical and inventive, but not polished. Despite their big budgets, these games did suffer with fans who expected more, given that both franchises feature other games with storylines that have you hooked from start to finish. Death Stranding 2, in particular, was seen as a step down from the first game because it felt like the story was recycled from the first game, with going across a continent and getting flashbacks through a BB.
Nothing that happened in Death Stranding is really built upon in the sequel, like Sam’s relationship with Lou. Players are left feeling unsatisfied because the sequel lacks the same emotional impact, in certain parts, as the first one. The story is the main motivation for Sam’s journey across the United States. Without a strong narrative to back it up, his journey seems repetitive.
An indie title that soared in popularity, despite all the flashiness of a big studio backing, was Undertale. The 2015 RPG, created by Toby Fox, is a triumph for indie devs everywhere. The story is so great because it was unlike any RPG out there, subverting expectations by turning players’ choices and video game mechanics into core elements of the story itself. How players went about gameplay was extremely important to the outcome, much like Nighthawks.
A chosen route, whether Pacifist, Neutral, or Genocide, changes everything about the game down to character behaviors and dialogue. The game essentially utilizes a player’s morality as a plot point, scolding them for treating characters as disposable. There are also a few meta mechanics that make the game feel alive, reacting to a person’s play style. Undertale was massively successful, despite all of the hurdles it had to jump through to get there, because the story was extremely solid. It was something people actually wanted to invest their time into. That’s what makes a game, indie or otherwise, special.
Nighthawks, a new game from The Curiosity Engine, is available to play now on PC via Steam.
