I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most video games look alike nowadays, especially the big triple-A ones. That’s why it’s always such a delight to see smaller titles with more creative visual styles. At this week’s PlayStation State of Play, the biggest standout was claymation horror The Midnight Walk.
As its developers described it during the showcase, it’s a “cosy horror game created entirely in clay” where you “journey down a nightmarish highway riddled with terrors that want to devour you and your little lantern creature”. Your job is to “outsmart these terrors and bring back fire to this mad world [they’ve] handcrafted for you”.
I don’t see how it’s cosy, but the rest seems cool.
The Rise Of Claymation
The Midnight Walk immediately struck me as one of those games that looks so incredibly unlike anything else that it stands out from the jump. It’s interesting that it feels that way, because at this point, it isn’t unique. Its character design reminds me of Grim Fandango, but the stop motion claymation will immediately call to mind last year’s Harold Halibut or the upcoming Xbox-published South of Midnight, and the lighting and gameplay channels Little Nightmares.
Hand-modeled clay in video games isn’t novel anymore – it’s already been done, fairly often in the last few years, too. In fact, stop-motion animation in video games has been done for decades. We’re also seeing people increasingly use alternative hand-crafted mediums to make their games. I’ve written about Scarlet Deer Inn, a game that uses hand-embroidered animations, The Master’s Pupil, which uses hand-painted (on paper!) assets, and Frank and Drake, which uses over 8,000 hand-drawn and hand-rotoscoped frames of animation layered over filmed footage.
Why are we seeing more handcrafted, labour-intensive mediums used in independent video game projects now? Maybe it’s because more artists are getting interested in using video games to tell stories. Maybe it’s because of technological advancements that make it faster to use this kind of animation style than it used to be. But it’s still far more difficult to do things this way than to use common computer-generated graphics, so I think it’s also because these games are more visually interesting than the typical photorealistic video game aesthetic.
Related
Best Animation Of 2024: A Shifting And Changing Year For The Medium
The medium once again provides some of the year’s most memorable stories and characters.
Claymation Is Incredibly Effective In Horror
Stop motion has long been used to animate the surreal. It’s been used in all kinds of animation, of course, but there’s usually a dreamlike quality to stop motion, emphasised by the fact that it doesn’t aim for realism, but with a degree of abstraction and almost cartoonishness because of the nature of the medium. The way stop motion portrays movement can so easily shift into the uncanny, and that’s why it’s so great for the horror genre. I can’t help but think of Coraline, a film that frightened children and adults alike.
And there’s something so gloriously frightening about the use of stop motion and claymation in horror, especially considering how many modern horror games veer as close to photorealism as possible for maximum player immersion and scares. They want to trick your brain into thinking a threat is real and immediate, and in theory, the closer to reality a game looks, the more afraid you’ll be.
There are so many of these, but I love an indie horror project that leans into stylisation. As well as Little Nightmares, you’ve also got Signalis and Mouthwashing, just to name a few. I find The Midnight Walk’s claymation style so particularly frightening because it looks like a game that sprouted straight from my childhood nightmares – something surreal that could be just as pleasant as it is terrifying. Claymation is hard work, but my god, it’s effective.
- Released
-
May 8, 2025
- Developer(s)
-
MoonHood
- Publisher(s)
-
Fast Travel Games