Video Game / Nightcry

"Were you expecting, maybe, Edward Scissorhands?"

Nightcry is a Survival Horror game developed by Nude Maker games. The game is a Spiritual Successor to the original Clock Tower games (being directed by the director of the first two games also helps). Like its predecessor, the player characters do not have access to weapons. As such, the player must run and hide or else suffer shear death.

The game is set aboard a luxurious cruise liner called the Oceanus on August 18, 2016. This cruise begins from Venezia, Italy, making a stop at Southampton, England, then finally crossing the Atlantic en route for the Caribbean Islands.

The heroine and her friends are college students from North America that had fieldwork training in the Aegean islands, making their trip back on this cruise liner. However, a group of cultists sneaked on board.

As the ship sails across the deep blue ocean, a series of gruesome and mysterious murders begins to take place by a female creature called Scissorwalker, including those of the ship's crew. Soon the ocean liner is crippled and adrift at sea, and has become an inescapable death trap for the passengers.

As Monica, Rooney, and Leonard, passengers of the ship, the player is tasked with solving the murder mystery to ensure their own survival as well as the rest of the ‘innocent’ passengers.

The game was released on March 29, 2016 for PC and on January 31, 2019 for PlayStation Vita.

You can read the original Kickstarter page here.

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The game provides examples of:

• All for Nothing: Leonard figures out what the cult is planning to do and that it's being run by a man with a false eye, but he's killed before he can do anything about this information. He at least gets to warn his students about the man, but by the time Rooney compares notes and learns from Monica that the man is Vigo, you are arbitrarily unable to warn the people who are hiding with him despite talking to them after that point. It takes until Rooney finds the independent research the ship's captain was doing on Vigo for the heroes to get the information again.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Certain details concerning the plot and the main cast's backstories are left out of the game and can only be read online.
  • A live action short film made as a companion to the game focuses heavily on the Scissorwalker's ability to spawn from even small puddles of water. This ability is relevant to the game's plot (most notably, how it gets into the storage room the survivor's are hiding in), but is never mentioned and only sort of shown on screen in game when it first emerges from a pool of blood, leaving many of its actions and appearances (like hiding in the vending machine it creates that pool of blood from to begin with) seem completely inexplicable.
• Alpha Bitch: Monica, Jessica, and Kelly all have shades of this but Monica is the most obvious.
• Ambiguously Evil: While the game overwhelmingly shows that there's something creepy going on with him, whether or not Eric is actually affiliated with the Cult is never actually made clear. It's strongly implied he's behind bad things happening to multiple characters - it's very likely he trapped Monica - but on a couple occasions he does things to help out the protagonists that seem counter to the Cult's goals. In fact, distrusting his help will get Rooney killed, if she doesn't take the medicine he gives, or takes the route through the vents that he doesn't suggest.
• Anachronic Order: Chapter three starts earlier than all other chapters, but also goes on longer than the others. Chapter one starts shortly after the beginning of Chapter three. Chapter two takes place somewhere in the middle of Chapter three.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: You switch player characters between chapters.
• Auto-Save: The game autosaves regularly. It also keeps certain major checkpoints permanently on the tree of the game's path branches, allowing you to fairly easily go back and make different choices. Unfortunately, the major Guide Dang It! branch of the game serves as the earliest branch on the tree, so you still have to restart from the very first checkpoint if you want to avoid a bad ending. Oddly, the Golden Ending branch is the only one that has permanent checkpoints for Scenes 1 and 2 of Chapter 3, meaning that several of the bad branches have Checkpoint Starvation, not having permanent saves from Chapter 2 Scene 2 all the way until Chapter 3 Scene 3.
• Badass Adorable: Don't let her shyness, awkwardness, and that suicidal ideation thing fool you; Rooney's quite a badass when the chips are down and she's forced to do anything she can to survive and save others.
• Barred from the Afterlife: Leonard explains on the way to the "Seduced by the Snake" ending that all of the Scissorwalker's victims are trapped experiencing a moment for eternity. When Vigo is killed, you finally see all of the souls of the Scissorwalker's victims move on.
• Body Horror: There's a lot of areas that have, or will, contain the handiwork of the Scissorwalker's killing spree. Special mention goes to Rooney finding Leonard, practically flayed everywhere except from the neck-up, in the infirmary room.
• Cassandra Truth: After Monica gets John Thompson's phone, she can be called by his co-workers. She explains to them that a killer is on the loose on the cruise ship and asks for help, but they quickly dismiss it as a prank and tell her to give the phone back to its owner before hanging up.
• Cell Phones Are Useless: While they serve as flashlights, and recharging stations double as save points, you can almost never call anyone useful for help (the only people you can ever talk to that aren't in danger themselves dismiss your pleas as a prank), and their ability to receive calls naturally depends on what the plot requires. Posting texts to spread awareness are required for good endings, but don't seem to actually make a narrative difference.
• Character Development: Most of the characters are fairly static, but Rooney especially goes through quite a bit of character development over the course of the game. At the start, she seems extremely detached, antisocial, and extremely awkward around the other characters, especially when her nickname of "Deathwish Diva" are called to attention. Depending on player choices, she can go from The Woobie to Badass Adorable, performing quite a few particularly death-defying feats, rescuing Monica, and choosing to survive no matter the costs. One of the dead end branches is even bad because she failed to get character development in that branch, and doesn't have the courage to turn off Leonard's life support, locking her into a bad ending.
• Chase Scene: Being a ClockTower successor, this is to be expected. You are very limited when it comes to fighting back against the Scissorwalker, and must rely on escaping and hiding to survive.
• Cleanup Crew: A few times the characters remark that for all the death and gore around them, there aren't a lot of bodies. You eventually discover that they're being brought to the dance hall and strung up like puppets. Whether it's the Scissorwalker, Vigo, or some Faithful remaining on the ship moving the bodies around is never answered. This is exaggerated in the "It's All Too Late" ending, where the Oceanus is discovered completely empty, with no signs of what happened to everyone on board, implying that even the gore and signs of struggles had been cleaned up by then.
• Conveniently Timed Attack from Behind: If Rooney reaches the ballroom and is grabbed by Jerome, Monica saves her by clubbing him over the head.
• Creepy Child: Connie, a little girl dressed in white that shows up in particular moments on the ship. She seems to be from Rooney's past, but Monica also sees her as well.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Certain Dead Ends and bad endings just sort of happen, without an especially clear reason why.
  • For example, if Leonard contacts the wrong radio frequency three times, he'll seem to be strangled(?) by some invisible entity or force which doesn't seem to appear at any other point in the game.
  • Another would be if Rooney fails to turn off Leonard's life support. She finds him insensate in the ship's hospital in a liquid suspension, flayed down to the organs and begging for death. If she doesn't deactivate the machine keeping him alive, he somehow escapes the sealed container he's in as a head attached to an ambulatory spinal cord, and proceeds to wrap himself around Rooney, whispering into her ear as she trembles in near-catatonia. It's understandable that the game would punish you for refusing to grant a mercy kill, but there's no explanation as to how or why he does this.
• Dramatic Slip: If you aren't careful, your characters may trip and fall.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Leonard puts on one of the cult's stone masks to slip past a group of cultists.
• Expy: Rooney is one of Jennifer Simpson. Aside from having the same last names, both are orphaned young girls (or disowned more or less in Rooney's case) that nobody takes seriously (Jennifer with everyone disbelieving her version of the events at the Barrows Manor, Rooney with everyone taunting her suicidal attitude) who ultimately show enormous resiliency in the face of the supernatural events they find themselves in to survive at any and all costs.
• Eyepatch of Power: Rooney sports this in the Golden Ending after she intentionally tears her own eye out.
• Glass Eye: Vigo has one in a bunsen burner filled with water to keep it sterilized. One of the first puzzles in the game is to find a lighter or match so that he can light the burner. In Chapter 2, Leonard finds a similar boiling glass eye on the island, and can potentially send a text message to his students warning them to beware of someone with a glass eye; this lets Rooney know in Chapter 3 not to trust Vigo. On the path to the best ending, Rooney replaces one of her own eyes with the spare; it turns out to be somehow related to the ritual that created the Scissorwalker.
• Gold Digger: Monica is pretty blatant about being one. Later in the game you learn she's an orphan supporting her siblings, and marrying a wealthy husband is essentially her only hope of being able to take care of her siblings.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Like Clock Tower 2 and Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within, NightCry has a few spots where you're almost guaranteed to get locked out of the Golden Ending if you don't do some really unintuitive things. Probably most infamous is the fact that if you don't take some change out of a cash register in Chapter 1, put said change in a vending machine (nearby another vending machine Monica just saw someone gorily killed, for bonus points) and then have the vending machine spit out a severed hand so you can take the wedding ring on it you will be unable to get a good ending and will have to start all over in order to finish the game. Especially since the dead end this causes doesn't crop up until halfway through Chapter 3, meaning you can play through almost the entire game without realizing it's impossible for you to get to the endgame.
  • Some puzzles require you to use inventory items on objects that don't appear as interactable objects unless you're holding the item in your hand already, making them very easy to miss if you just scan the scene with your mouse pointer. The rope and hand of glory puzzles in Chapter 2 are particularly notable examples.
• Haunted Fetter: The Sciosswalker's victims seem to become malevolent ghosts that can interact with the world near their body or parts of their flesh.
  • The "horror" involving moving bushes has a lump of flesh sitting in it.
  • The shadow in the mirror Leonard encounters appears to be related to the "female sculpture" nearby that is vaguely implied to actually be a preserved corpse.
  • The animated baby doll that attacks Rooney has a human's eyes and mouth stuffed inside it.
  • The ambiguous death involving John Thompson's corpse on the ceiling of the elevator directly involves his corpse and where you last saw it.
  • Jessica dies during the first chapter, but she can still use her phone and tries to trick both Leonard (in some branches) and Rooney (once she gets her number) to their deaths later on with it. It's probably best for Angie that Monica took John's phone before he animated.
• Immune to Bullets: Kelly mentions that she noticed the Scissorwalker was unaffected by bullets when the ship's security team tried and failed to stop it.
• Interface Spoiler: Of a sort. The Load Game screen gives a large scenario tree with indicators of the various choices that have put you on a specific path once you've hit a specific point in the chapter. As a result, you can glance over it in order to find clues to specific choices you need to make in order to not have the game end prematurely.
• In the Hood: The Scissorwalker wears one, along with a face-obscuring mask.
• Macabre Moth Motif: Moths first appear innocuously in Leonard's chapter, naturally hovering around lights on the cultists' island. That connection to the cult goes into overdrive in the last section of the game, where moths are suddenly everywhere on the Oceanus, hovering around the Meat Moss that has appeared all over in the aftermath of most of the passengers' deaths.
• MacGyvering: Rooney suspects that the bomb that goes off at the end of Chapter two was improvised from a chemical fertilizer the ship was carrying.
• The Many Deaths of You: The game actually has a record of all the possible deaths that you can get for the unfortunate protagonists. It even unlocks an achievement if it's a Dead End.
• Multiple Endings: There numerous endings, but similar to Clock Tower most of them are just unique Game Overs.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: The Scissorwalker appears to be able to control machines remotely and teleport, except when they can't.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The game is set on August 18 2016, about 5 months after its release date (March 29 2016).
• Obviously Evil: Vigo Boradsov.
• Permanently Missable Content: Easily triggered, since you sometimes can't go back to areas even within the same act. While some non-standard game overs occur quickly after the player makes a wrong choice, the conditions that trigger some of them aren't noticed for a long time, and the player may save the game after they've doomed themselves. Monica failing to find Jessica's corpse guarantees everyone's death at the end of the second act (for no clear reason), and it's possible to miss an item in the first act that locks Rooney out of the best ending — i.e., the one where she lives.
• Press X to Not Die: If the Scissorwalker catches you during a chase segment, you have to click repeatedly in order to temporarily incapacitate it. However, this does use up a lot of the character's stamina and getting caught again without recovering will likely result in your death. There are also cutscenes that require your character to hold an icon over a moving reticle or else your character will be dealt a lethal blow.
• Story Breadcrumbs: A good chunk of the game seems completely inexplicable, contributing to its Narm-filled reputation, but there are actually answers for many of those moments. Unfortunately, it often requires getting bad endings or rare events to have the context to start piecing them together. Leonard's fate, for instance, seems completely out of genre, but there are implications throughout the game that Vigo really is a bit of a Mad Scientist, creating the Scissorwalker and potentially doing something similar to Rooney in one ending. Other seemingly inexplicable deaths the player can suffer, such as from the old lady in the elevator, the corpse in the elevator, and trusting Jessica's post-mortem call, show that the Scissorwalker's victims become its ghostly minions (something Leonard's head alludes to prior to the Seduced by the Snake ending). Even cartoonish moments like the vending machine deaths have a common theme of water and liquids that are never made explicit but are consistently portrayed about the Scissorwalker.
• Schmuck Bait: Clicking on certain objects will immediately trigger a Scissorwalker attack. These are typically scenes of extreme carnage (the Scissorwalker seems to have the ability to manifest from pools of blood or large amounts of gore), or fairly obvious traps such as moving bushes from which laughter can be heard.
• Sequence Breaking: The game uses very simple event flags to arbitrarily kill you or trigger bad endings when you don't perform certain tasks exactly as it wants, but if you use an item like your phone in areas where these events flags would be tripped, you can skip some of them entirely.
• Shear Menace: Like its predecessor, the main characters are menaced by a antagonist wielding a large pair of scissors.
• Sole Survivor:
  • Monica and Rooney are the only survivors of the cruise in the Golden Ending.
  • In another possible ending, titled "The lone survivor," It seems to be Eric, for whatever reason.
• Thrown Down a Well: As seen in the live action companion short, Yolanda and her baby were forced down the well on the cult's island. She tried to climb back out, but was slashed and pushed back down. Later on, the well is the only place Leonard can run into the Scissorwalker.
• The Unsolved Mystery: There is never a clear explanation of who Eric is, what the deal is with Jerome's faulty memory and face-heel at the end, or what Vigo and the cult were trying to achieve.
• Villains Out Shopping: You can find Scissorwalker sitting in the theater and laughing at the screen (which isn't actually showing anything) with their weapon leaned against the seat next to them. Unfortunately, the Scissorwalker will then notice you and start a chase sequence.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • Vigo, the owner of the ship, loves seeing people enjoying their cruise. So much so that he sits on his own in the bar in the lower-class area while a major party is going on elsewhere, waiting to boil his artificial eye to sterilize it (even though he has his own quarters and a dedicated infirmary on the ship with sterilization facilities), bemoaning that he has nothing to light a fire with while there is a box of matches 10 feet away and in clear view of the barman who is presumably employed by Vigo and can see exactly what he's trying to do. He also visibly has two working eyes in his head.
  • Why was a dead member of the crew carrying three billiard balls? To remember the password to the Captain's Quarters!
  • At one point during Rooney's chapter, Eric — the crew member who was first seen chopping up fabric while rubbing an ominous bleeding wound on the back of his neck and who she has been directly told not to trust — gives her antibiotics. Never mind that she hasn't exhibited any symptoms or that taking them without seeing a doctor first might not be the best idea even if he was entirely trustworthy, because if you don't, she later drops dead almost instantly from blood poisoning.
• Wham Shot: When the camera whips around and shows you Eric and Cobie's shirtless corpse, the ending of Leonard's chapter is re-contextualized. Especially after finishing the segment and realizing you need to trust Eric after all, it becomes apparent that Cobie followed Leonard's instructions and the masked man that attacked the group was Jerome in Cobie's jacket.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • If Angie doesn't sacrifice herself to save Rooney from Scissorwalker (which only occurs if you flee into the store she's hiding in while being chased by Scissorwalker), then her fate remains unknown; her corpse is missing from the tableau of dead passengers in the final confrontation.
  • The Golden Ending in which Rooney and Monica survive and are rescued leaves the fate of Jerome and Eric completely unaddressed; the former was merely knocked out during the final confrontation, and the latter simply disappears before the endgame happens.
• You All Look Familiar: There are only a few NPC models in the game, so in the few crowd shots they get reused multiple times. At the beginning of chapter three, the camera is set at an angle that only shows the lower body of most of the crowd, obscuring the fact that there are multiple Jessicas and Kellys at the party, to say the least (the alternate conversation camera angles give this away). This actually makes the question of who exactly dies and who lives hard to answer, as the crowd of corpses at the end of the game also contains duplicates and Rooney's horrified reactions don't mention anyone by name, making it hard to determine if Kelly, for example, is actually dead or just had her model used to fill out the crowd.

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