NIGHTSLINK is a “cassette tape delivery service” simulator and indie horror walking simulator developed by a developer from Portugal who according to their Itch.io page has created a whole bunch of free games before including like Enigma, Make Me Laugh, morbus and more. I haven’t been able to find a whole bunch more of the game, nor do I even remember how I found out about the game persay. What I do remember though is the feeling that the game gave me, evoking the Paratopic vibe with crunchy Playstation 1 graphics and driving around on a motorcycle with vague storytelling. I added it onto my wishlist at some point and then later on during Christmas of 2021 my man Melon, who has his own Youtube channel (link below).
The gameplay section is more of the same like Paratopic, you walk around and mostly click on things in your environment which includes only doors and tapes aside from really short motorcycle riding sections and it also must be completed in one session. I have absolutely no problem with that, and for the most part I don’t have a problem with the plot either. You play as the Nightslink, which I assume is a job role for couriers who deliver cassette tapes to people hiding behind closed doors, afraid of the outside. COVID comparisons aside, the main reason for the quarantine is unknown but it’s your job to deliver a certain amount of cassette tapes every day to specific people in the apartments after recording them. The main location is a specific apartment building, and the game takes over a space of four different days. [spoiler]The first day is a normal run, delivering tapes though you can knock on Door 85 to get handed a letter, which you can deliver to Door 83 on the next day. Regardless, every day you’ll also see the same black suited Christian Bale looking-f u c ker standing and staring at you.
The next day is the same, you can hand Door 83 a letter instead of a tape which contains a poem and the rest can get more tapes. While all days have transitions which have you riding a motorcycle at night, the third day sees Christian Bale walking alongside you in the last leg before it fades into your last delivery day. It’s way darker than the previous two, none of the residents that you’re delivering cassette tapes to are particularly chatty except one who ominously talks about not burying their dead and another talking about night terrors. Knocking on Room 90 on this day will get you an achievement but otherwise entering Room 96 produces a black orb on a bloody bed and then the day is over. The fourth day you’re recording the tapes again and the black orb is on your desk, and when you get back to the apartments everyone’s hands are poking out of their doors with their own orbs being held out, your delivery instructions being cryptic symbols. Walking through the apartment, Christian Bale chides you for screwing up and when you walk to the end of the apartments you’ll find the place where you were recording your tapes. Behind that lies a rustic room with a giant hole in the ground and a black orb on the top. All the black orbs come together and sink together into the giant hole, and the last thing you see before the credits are the roads you’re walking on, and giant monsters walking around with a green filter slapped on top of it.[/spoiler] My feelings on the plot will be in the outro paragraph so look there.
Just like Paratopic before it, most of the stuff you will hear consists of gibberish sounding dialogue insanely filtered to sound less coherent, ambient noises like tape cassettes being moved around and feet pattering, and maybe a little bit of ominous droning that’s there but isn’t really pronounced until the end. There isn’t anything memorable in terms of music other than the droning but it does enhance the lovecraftian-esque horror vibes that it’s going for. The gibberish sounding dialogue is cool but honestly if I were to pinpoint a sound I loved the most then it would be the sound of the cassette tapes being moved around and clanking into the recorder which just has this beautiful feel that for some strange reason would make me watch a cassette tape recording ASMR video at some point. Other than that, I have nothing to really relay audio wise.
The visual design is much like Paratopic: retro chunky graphics mixed in with a sort of fuzzy filter to it which to me looked pretty good and I won’t ever complain about this I don’t think. As for the atmosphere of the game itself, it’s very lonely as you barely see any character models in the slightest except the Christian Bale looking guy and maybe some other models near the end of the game. The arms look like a plastic doll arm you can pop in with blended clothing colors and a face that looks like a paper mask that was pulled back and split in half. It’s an interesting look but otherwise he looks dapper in his John Wick suit. Otherwise, atmospherically this game has a look of darkness; the only things you see being the night as you drive off in your motorcycle along with empty, barely lit apartment hallways that just feel alone. There is nothing but disembodied voices behind those doors and it certainly adds to the sort of dark vibe it has. To wrap this up, if I were to assign a color to this game, it would be black.
NIGHTSLINK was an interesting look into a strange world involving a lot of the same feelings that Paratopic did: strange entities, the use of old tapes, delivery systems and more. I understand that I can’t necessarily compare NIGHTSLINK to Paratopic all the time as they’re completely different projects but to be honest I wish this game had delivered a bit more for what it came out with. There was vague storytelling and while it had interesting elements I didn’t feel like there was enough really there for me to really grab ahold of and examine. It’s a very simple game and I love what’s there, I just wish there was more of it and not in the “tease but not reveal” but in the “it needs to be fleshed out a tad bit more” way. Like I want to figure out what these cassette tapes are? Why are you handing them out? Overall though, I’m not going to hate on NIGHTSLINK for what it does, and how you feel about the base price of 3.99 for the 30 minute or so time frame that the game delivers is really up to you. As for me, I hope that Noiseminded goes back to this somehow and either adds more or creates another game that continues to expand what this game did previously.
Links:
https://x.com/noiseminded?lang=en
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2916864147
https://linktr.ee/Noiseminded
https://itch.io/profile/noiseminded
https://m.youtube.com/@MelonMan666
