Midnight Ultra is a Retraux First-Person Shooter by Forward Instinct, a small indie team, for whom it was their first and so far only game. Made on Unity, the game was released on Halloween 2017 on Steam and itch.io.
The game looks and plays like someone made a First-Person Shooter on the original Gameboy, featuring a limited 4-bit color palette and very simple, abstract low-res graphics, and even an old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio. Taking place in the American Southwest, the story follows a witch hunter pursuing a cult in various abandoned rural environments.
Tropes
- Bottomless Magazines: In retro style, your weapons don't need to be reloaded and can be fired as long as you have ammo.
- Cold Sniper: The Devil's Path DLC takes place high in the snow-covered Himalayan mountains and has cultist snipers stationed around the mountain.
- Comet of Doom: The Devil's Path DLC has the protagonist tracking down an ancient meteor that's apparently the source of all evil paranormal activity on the planet.
- Disc-One Nuke: The magic spell is objectively better than any of the other melee weapons because it actually has range, making ammo management a non-issue. You can use it to take out enemies at close-medium range, saving your ammo for long range sniping. It is slower-firing and less damaging than the revolver, with a slower projectile, but having infinite ammo more than makes up for that.
- Exploitation Film: The game's premise and aesthetic are inspired by 70's Grindhouse films.
- Fake Difficulty: Because of the limited 4-color palette and low-res graphics, at times floors, walls, and open spaces can blend together, making it hard to tell the exact layout of the environment.
- Feathered Fiend: Hostile eagles are an enemy in the Devil's Path DLC, set in the Himalaya mountains.
- Final Boss: The final boss of the main game is the cult leader, riding a motorcycle and wielding a double-barrel shotgun, who you fight in a graveyard. The Devil's Path DLC campaign ends with a boss fight against a Kaiju-sized Yeti, and later the alien tumor inside it that houses the meteor fragment.
- Fragile Speedster: Yetis are huge and very fast, but aren't any more durable than regular enemies.
- Gainax Ending: The ending of the Devil's Path DLC, which concludes the story, is 2001: A Space Odyssey ending levels of weird. After killing the Alien Tumor and picking up the meteor fragment that was inside it, a series of heavily distorted VHS images play, including walking through the forest, various creatures such as salamanders and shrimp, what seem to be nuclear explosions occuring across the planet, and finally a pan across the Cult Leader's motorcycle, which your character had previously claimed as his own.
- Giant Mook: Large dual cleaver-wielding luchadores can take noticeably more damage to put down than the standard baseball-bat wielding punks, having about 3 times the health of regular enemies.
- Grim Up North: The Devil's Path DLC takes place in a mountain in the Himalayas, that you slowly scale while battling Yetis and other snow-related enemies.
- Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: It's hard to tell from the abstract in-game graphics, but the concept art of the game heavily implies the melee enemies are men and the pistol-wielding enemies are women.
- Hell Hotel: The last couple of levels take place in a creepy motel called the Palms Beyond that makes heavy use of Alien Geometries.
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The game takes place the night before Halloween.
- Limited Loadout: You can only carry 1 firearm and 1 melee weapon, and cannot switch your loadout in the middle of a level. Before starting the game, you're given a choice of firearms and melee weapons, including a revolver, shotgun, submachine gun, or rifle for your firearm and a baseball bat, meat cleaver, fists, or magic spell for your melee weapon.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The weakest enemy type is a emaciated zombie that runs reasonably fast and lets out a 8-bit zombie moan when killed.
- Painfully Slow Projectile: Instead of normal bullets, enemy guns fire slow-moving orbs reminiscent of 1980's NES-era games. Enemy snipers in Devil's Path do fire black projectiles that move at a decent speed, about the same as a standard FPS rocket.
- Resources Management Gameplay: The amount of ammo you're given is quite limited; while avoiding enemies isn't particularly viable, you do need to avoid missing and find as many available ammo pickups as possible.
- Short-Range Shotgun: The shotgun needs to be at almost point-blank range to do max damage, at anything past several feet it takes 1-2 more blasts than it normally would to kill an enemy.
- Shotguns Are Just Better:
- The Himalayan cultists in Devil's Path are armed with shotguns that fire a cross-shaped spread of 5 projectiles. At close range, if all of them hit it can deal massive damage to you.
- Zig-zagged with the player shotgun. It's more effective at close range than other weapons, but ineffective at long range, which can be a problem when dealing with ranged enemies at long range since you can only carry 1 firearm. Also, while it does roughly twice as much damage as the revolver, it still requires 2 shots to kill anything stronger than a zombie or shadow witch. On the plus side, you get the same amount of ammo for it as you do the revolver even though it does about twice as much damage.
- Shout-Out: The main hall of the Palms Beyond hotel is styled after that of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
- Sniper Pistol: The revolver has perfect accuracy, while the submachine gun has moderate bullet spread and the shotgun is, well, a shotgun.
- Sniper Rifle: The bolt-action rifle is accurate and does about twice the damage as the revolver, but you also get half as much ammo for it as for the revolver or even the shotgun, and it still takes 2 shots to kill anything stronger than a zombie or shadow witch, making it Awesome, but Impractical. If you're going to use it as your firearm, it's almost mandatory to have the magic spell as your melee weapon so you'll still have a range option for weaker enemies.
- Weird West: The game takes place in the remote American southwest, features an acid western soundtrack that invokes the soul-draining heat of the desert, and has a witch hunter battling a cult in creepy abandoned rural environments.
