Nocturne is a 1999 survival horror adventure from Terminal Reality, published by Take-Two Interactive and Gathering. It sends The Stranger, voiced by Lynn Mathis, across four cases for Spookhouse, the monster-fighting agency President Theodore Roosevelt founded. The game opens with him walking back into headquarters after a mission nobody describes, and that refusal to explain itself is the whole pitch.
Werewolves on the Train
The structure is an anthology of the strange. The four cases:
- A German village, where a vampire Count holds a relic that would make any vampire who possesses it immune to vampiric weakness.
- A train ambushed by a werewolf pack with a grudge, then a town whose zombie outbreak traces to an abandoned mine.
- A factory run by Al Capone’s gang that is secretly building an army of undead gangsters.
- A French graveyard, where a former Spookhouse operative named Killian Hammond is summoning the dead.
In the first case, The Stranger travels with a dhampir named Svetlana. The vampires along the way are killing each other instead of working together. The village mayor, it turns out, is the Count’s father, usurped and waiting ages for revenge. He thanks The Stranger for killing his son.
Al Capone’s Undead Gangsters
The third case is the best one. An informant named Icepick, one of the reanimated mobsters gone rogue, helps The Stranger infiltrate a movie theater for proof of Capone’s operation. The enforcer Smiley shows up there, then again inside the factory, then a third time at the exit. The Stranger drops him into a vat of acid.
The fourth case turns inward. Killian locks The Stranger in a dungeon and explains he was forced to retire over his hatred of the supernatural creatures Spookhouse recruits, ever since a vampire killed his wife. The Stranger frees a missing demonic agent named Moloch, escapes, and walks out silently while Moloch takes his revenge. The Colonel later warns him not to let his own distaste for monsters consume him.
The epilogue is a hard cut: The Stranger finds Spookhouse headquarters mutilated, and a message on the briefing room wall in blood reading, “I finally found you, Stranger!” Screen to black.
What holds Nocturne back is its controls. Moving and aiming are separate, and a weapon must be drawn before it fires. Encounter an enemy and the sequence is draw, aim, evade, then shoot, four decisions where one should do.
The anthology shape is the smartest thing here, and the Capone case is where it peaks. The published IGDB critic aggregate sits at 8.1 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
