Developer: Octavi Navarro
Publisher: Octavi Navarro
Year: 2017
Genre: Adventure

Midnight Scenes: The Highway is the first entry in a horror anthology series by Octavi Navarro, who also worked as an artist on Thimbleweed Park. There are currently five games in the series, with each one being completely standalone, but I would still recommend this one as a great place to start. The games feature gorgeous pixel art and all can be completed in one sitting, with some like this game only being 15 minutes long and later games in the series taking about 90 minutes to play through.

In Midnight Scenes: The Highway you play as a woman who is stranded on a road after her path is blocked by a downed power line and must explore the area to find a way around, but something creepy is lurking out there. This entry in the series is strongly inspired by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and revisiting it reminds me that later games pull back on this and do their own thing a bit more by transitioning to color, dropping opening narration, and feel more violent and arguable more monster focused too. This certainly isn’t a complaint about any of the games in the series. I think they’re all great. It’s just interesting to see how the series has evolvesd. I think adventure game fans who enjoy horror but don’t want to be frustrated will be into this game. It’s not a difficult game, with puzzles that are very straightforward but don’t feel like busy work, no death sequences, and it only being 15 minutes long. That might be a turnoff to some hardcore fans of the genre but I feel very comfortable recommending it to people that just want some creepy vibes for a bit.

Octavi also developed some other short horror games outside of this series that I would recommend, The Supper and The Librarian, that play very similarly to the Midnight Scenes series and can be completed in one sitting.

Midnight Scenes: The Highway is available on Itch.io and Steam.