The Night is Grey Review

Check out our review of The Night is Grey to find out what we thought about being lost in the woods and helping a little girl to safety.

The Night is Grey begins with no introductory scenes to ease you in. A bearded man appears on the screen from the left as he runs away from a pack of wolves. As the first chapter progresses, he encounters a little girl and endeavors to take her to her grandparents. That’s the core of it, but nothing is as it seems here.

Over succeeding chapters, The Night is Grey follows protagonist Graham and his young companion Hannah as they struggle with the environment – and sometimes with each other – all while pushing on through woods, mines, and other locales.

It bears mentioning at the outset that The Night is Grey is very dedicatedly a point-and-click adventure game. This means that it loves having you look around your surroundings, pick up objects, and use those objects with each other or with the environment around you.

In the first chapter, I was worried that The Night is Grey would undercut its dark and mysterious tone by tossing in Monkey Island-style puzzles for its gameplay. Surprisingly, the game managed to avoid this. If you’re willing to excuse gameplay conceits that serve to make the puzzles actually enjoyable, you’ll find that the game’s puzzles are logical and intuitive for the most part. I never found myself stuck for long, and when I solved my conundrum, I felt quite silly for not having seen the solution sooner.

It helps that each chapter of the game only presents you a handful of environments to explore at a time. The game’s very handy hint system also makes sure that you don’t miss any interactive objects in the scene. Call these modern sensibilities if you will, but they helped me rediscover the joy of point-and-click adventure games that drew me to this genre in the first place.

There’s a certain repetition to Graham’s adventure that’s comforting in the lonely night – you find yourself in a new place, find the exit (such as a locked gate or a flooded mine exit), and then figure out exactly how you can access or unlock that exit.

Fair, much of the game is spent foraging for items, restoring power, looking for keys and suchlike, which is a departure from talking to a variety of characters and exploring the world of the narrative. Fans who come to point-and-clicks looking for that may find themselves disappointed here, but I have a certain fondness for works with limited casts that are set during lonely nights.

With that, and given how smooth the game’s puzzles were, I could not fault The Night is Grey for putting the puzzles front-and-center.

Despite the focus on puzzles, the game’s story maintains its intrigue to the very end. It packs twists of all sizes that frequently inspire questions at the same time as suggesting answers. By keeping strict control over how much the player is allowed to know, The Night is Grey constantly invites curiosity and makes you wonder where this story is ultimately going to end up.

Where does it end up, then? I won’t give away the game’s central twist, of course, but I was impressed by how cleverly the game played its cards and how unusual an adventure it ended up being. The ending may prove to be divisive, and I feel that division in opinion within me as well. The longer I spend thinking over it, though, I appreciate the game for what it does with its raw, indie sensibility.

Furthermore, whether you’ll like The Night is Grey or not comes down to how much you’re willing to give its protagonist a chance. Unlike many other point-and-click heroes, Graham isn’t particularly witty or funny (he does try though), and has a penchant for constantly putting himself down. It gets a bit grating, but surprisingly, it makes sense at the end of it all. You’ll see – if you stick around.

The Night is Grey is firmly entrenched in its gameplay genre, the LucasArts-style point-and-click adventure game – which proves to be a double-edged sword. While it doesn’t hold that much wider appeal for fans outside the genre, it most certainly is an easy recommendation for fans of combining inventory items and devising unorthodox solutions. For those fans, The Night is Grey will offer up an uncommon story presented with lush visuals and atmospheric sound design.

Developer: Whalestork Interactive
Country of Origin: Portugal
Publisher: Whalestork Interactive
Release Date: January 5, 2024 (PC)

This review of The Night is Grey is based on a copy of the game provided by the developer. The PC version of The Night is Grey was played for this review.

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The Night is Grey Review

Check out our review of The Night is Grey to find out what we thought about being lost in the woods and helping a little girl to safety.

This Article was written by: Rahul Shirke