Night Call | PC Review

“You are a taxi driver. Paris is your city and you know every corner of it.”

Paris has been the subject of many art forms. The city inspires people around the world, and has a huge history that someone can use to tell a story. MonkeyMoon and Blackmuffin Studio developed, and Raw Fury released a game that allows you to experience Paris from the viewpoint of a taxi driver: Night Call. 

Seven Days

You are one of the hundreds of taxi drivers in the City of Light. It’s a scary time, because a serial killer is roaming the streets of Paris, spreading fear and terror. You are the only one who survived an encounter with the killer. A jaded, yet zealous investigator coerces you into helping her catch this killer. You have seven days to find the killer or go to jail in his stead. She knows things about you, so she uses you to make this arrest. You must be careful, or running out of gas is the least of your troubles. You must find clues, drive around clients from one end of Paris to the other, earn enough money to keep your taxi going and hopefully catch the killer after seven days. It’s gonna be a very stressful week.

Cabbie Investigator

Night Call is described as a “non-linear, narrative-driven noire investigation game,” and this is correct. The whole game revolves around talking to the people that enter your cab. Or hardly talking to them. That’s also a choice you can make. Customers present themselves, and you can choose to pick them up or go for someone else. If there’s only one to pick up, you have to take that one. You can also visit locations that you find in your investigations and have interactions there. But I have to warn you, weird things happen in Paris, and not all of your passengers are, for lack of a better word, normal. Half the fun is finding all the eclectic people and trying out varying ways of interacting with them.

Keep Driving

Driving around a taxi in Paris comes with its own difficulties, and thus there are three investigations to choose from and different difficulty levels with which to experience them. I played two of the three cases in story mode, which is supposed to be the easiest mode. But keeping your taxi on the road isn’t easy at all, and a bad choice can be quickly made. You have to find a good balance between investigating and making money, otherwise you have to hand in your keys and the game is over. Sometimes you need to play a case a few times to determine whether a particular customer or expense is worth it.

No Interconnectivity

While there is a lot of fun to be had driving around the weird and wonderful inhabitants of France’s capital, it does get a bit repetitive. It looks like certain customers are appearing more than others and not every customer has something to do with the current case. The cases are a closed off story, and they all have the same start: you wake up from a coma in the hospital because you survived the attack by the serial killer you’re then asked to investigate. I had hoped that it would be an interconnected story, but that is not the case. This disappointed me a bit, but also has upsides. You can try out different approaches to customers you already had, to see how they react, and it makes it easy to jump right into the game on a higher difficulty. I also got the impression that certain customers only appear in certain scenarios, even when they don’t have anything to do with the general plot, but this could also be a coincidence.

Noir Synth

The controls are incredibly easy: you select and click on which customer or location you want to visit, or which conversation choice you want to make. The rest goes pretty much by itself. What stood out for me was the music that accompanies the atmospheric black and white graphics. The developers went with an 80’s synth score, which I like a lot. It somehow fits very well, gives the game a timeless quality, and is a nice departure from the usual jazz scores that are used in many noir stories. 

Night Call Conclusion

All in all, I enjoyed Night Call. I met many interesting characters, helped catch two serial killers, and had fun with the story. It took me about 5 hours to finish a case, but this was on story-mode, so higher difficulties might take a bit longer. Not that it’s a punishment to drive around Paris… The city is mesmerizing in its own way here. I hope we will see some new cases in the future. Now if you’ll excuse me, I see my next customer waving, and he’s wearing a Santa suit.

This review is based on a copy of the game provided by Raw Fury for coverage purposes and could get a console release in the near future.