YMMV / Nocturne (1999)

• Complete Monster: Count Voicu, from Act I, is the vampire master of Castle Gaustadt and tyrannical lord of its lands, having usurped and exiled his father and his followers. Spending centuries warring with his father, Voicu spent centuries persecuting and terrorizing the people he rules over, escalating things when werewolves stepped into the fight. Voicu has a reputation is stealing children from villages to feed on and creates monstrous slaves, while he takes young women to be his sex slaves. When the heroine, the Stranger, and Svetlana Lupescu arrive and find themselves in the middle of his war, Voicu takes a liking to Svetlana, hoping to use her Dhampir powers to his advantage, and begins to drive her insane to make a new bride out of her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When The Stranger first meets Icepick in Act 3, The Stranger's response is to pull his guns and threaten Icepick, once he sees that he's been turned into one of the Frankenstein-like creatures Al Capone has been making. Icepick assures that he's still a good guy even after being killed and put back together. He ends his statement by adding "I didn't ask for this."
• Magnificent Bastard: The Stranger is Spookhouse's top field agent. Perpetually stoic and sardonic, what the Stranger lacks in people skills, he makes up for in being an effective monster hunter. His claim to fame was wiping out communities of different horrors, earning him the attention of ancient gods and demons alike. Mostly relying on mundane firearms, the Stranger's feats include near single handedly saving a town from a zombie outbreak, fighting off a werewolf attack on the way to said outbreak, and uncovering and dismantling a mob operation to create zombified enforcers. Despite his admitted disdain for monsters, he sets it aside and considerably mellows from it over the years: setting out to save the dhamphir Svetlana from being one of Count Voicu's brides, and helping Moloch escape a madman's murder-house filled with elaborate death traps. During an investigation on Burkittsville, the Stranger saves Doc Holliday from suspicious townsfolk with a cover-story of them being in the FBI while using a toy badge to trick them; the Stranger would then help Holliday rescue a child that the evil spirit Hecaitomix is keeping captive, before sealing the demon off.
• Narm:
  • The voice acting is generally standard for the time, but Stranger calling Svetlana a "crazy bitch" is probably the top example.
  • While most of the game's assets are top-notch for their time, the majority of the soundtrack consists of the stock "horror" production music that has also appeared in dozens, if not hundreds, of other well-known projects. The main title theme doesn't exactly chill the bones after you've heard it pop up again in, say, a Tic-Tac commercial.
• Narm Charm: The live-action intro is cheesy and obviously done on a low budget, but it also has a some genuinely and compellingly frightening imagery.
• Player Punch: After getting to know Spookhouse the entire game, especially if the player did the chapters in order and thus saved Moloch from Killian's mad monster mansion only minutes prior, the epilogue caps the game off with everyone dead and ripped to shreds just to screw with the Stranger, and only presumably Holliday still alive but in the clutches of whoever caused it all. Cue one of the most abrupt and cruelest cliffhangers in gaming, with no sequel possible due to Terminal Reality folding a good number of years later.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Nocturne's slower and more deliberately-paced gameplay actually has a lot more in common with the classic Alone in the Dark series than it does Resident Evil. The bad news is, this includes a lot of platforming and jumping puzzles, like AitD had.
  • Speaking of platforming, Nocturne's is probably the single worst aspect of the game. A Game-Breaking Bug due to higher FPS on modern hardware causes even so much as dropping a knee's length in height to take massive amounts of fall damage. This can happen by running down stairs, resulting in a swift Death by Falling Over. Nevermind bottomless pits and timing hazards for platforming sequences with a fixed camera angle and, in at least one case, a leap of faith towards a platform you only see when the camera transitions mid-jump!
• Spiritual Adaptation: Want a game about something very, very close to the BPRD from Hellboy? Nocturne should scratch that itch.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The real-time shadows looked absolutely phenomenal back in 1999, along with the flowing cloth effects and several other bits of eye candy.

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