The Goodbye Note
Things get weird in The Goodbye Note.
Last year, talented pixel artist Octavi Navarro released their first game as a little Halloween freebie, and this year sees a follow-up in the form of Midnight Scenes: The Goodbye Note, a similarly monotone, similarly eerie point-and-click. The games are presented as entries in a Twilight Zone-style anthology series, and the second is slightly more ambitious, boasting a handful of locations, a more interesting story to chew upon, and—in true Twilight Zone fashion—a more emphatic gut punch waiting at the ending twist. Beginning on a turbulence-stricken aeroplane, in a violent thunderstorm no less, you’re soon flashed back to a top-secret laboratory, and to a mysterious substance that shouldn’t be messed around with.
The plot is pure B-movie, and wonderfully so, shrinking a Cold War-era sci-fi film down to a more compact 20-30 minutes, while adding a handful of puzzles to keep your brain engaged. The art, as you might expect from an artist who worked on Thimbleweed Park, is some of the best you’ll find in any pixel art game: Characterful, slightly cartoony, but still entirely fitting with the game’s largely serious tone.
But it’s that pointing, and of course that clicking, that has evolved the most since the original Midnight Scenes, which was too small in every way to really grapple with. This is a proper adventure game, with a few good puzzles and a story that takes you on a journey, as your desperate scientist tries his best to save mankind. It’s an enjoyably pulpy adventure game, and if the series continues like this, in a couple more Halloweens we’ll be playing a truly great one.