Nocturne is a video game released for PC by Terminal Reality in 1999. It's a survival horror game set in the 1920's and 1930's, starring the player as The Stranger, an operative for the secret organization known as "Spookhouse". He fights werewolves, zombies, vampires, and worse.

Graphics and Gameplay

The game sold moderately well, driven largely by its graphics; they were bleeding-edge in 1999, and they're still fairly solid today. The shadow effects, one of the biggest selling points, are intricate and realistic, and the makers strongly encourage players to play in a darkened room for maximum effect. The sound is also very detailed. The two major problems with Nocturne are its camera angles and controls. Like many survival horror games, Nocturne features prerendered backgrounds against which 3d models are rendered in realtime. Because of this, survival horror game makers must carefully choose the positions of the camera angles, which are universally static. The camera angles frequently are chosen more for form than function; it's not uncommon to be unable to clearly see what you're doing. The controls are fairly standard for the genre, but survival horror games typically are best played with joysticks or console controllers, and the only options for Nocturne are keyboard or keyboard and mouse, which many players have difficulty adjusting to because it is closer to the control scheme of a first-person shooter like Quake rather than that of a 3rd-person game like Resident Evil or Alone in the Dark.

Storyline

Instead of a single over-arching story, Nocturne's gameplay is broken up into 4 independent Acts. Each Act is a self-contained campaign that can be selected as soon as the game begins. Although the 4 Acts can be played in any order, they progress in chronological order from 1 to 4 and thus some very minor details (such as agents that join or leave the Spookhouse organization as time passes) are easiest to see when you play the Acts in that order. The Acts are as follows:

Act I: Dark Reign of the Vampire King

The Stranger reluctantly teams up with a half-vampire Spookhouse agent named Svetlana Lupescu to retrieve a powerful artifact from a remote vampire-occupied castle in Germany. This chapter features a large number of different enemies, including ghouls, werewolves, and vampires. Different enemies have different weaknesses, creating a greater variety of gameplay.

Act II: Tomb of the Underground God

The Stranger uses his dual pistols and a double-barrel shotgun to battle a zombie outbreak in a small, secluded wild-west style American town. As the title suggests, an H.P. Lovecraft-style entity ultimately makes an appearance. This chapter is mostly about killing zombies, although other monstrous creatures appear towards the end of the chapter.

Act III: Windy City Massacre

Al Capone is creating an army of Frankenstein-style reanimated mobsters, so the Stranger packs up his tommygun and travels to Chicago to stop this nefarious plot. This chapter has less of a horror feel and is more like an action movie. The only enemy you face are the Frankenmobsters, who (despite the fact they have green skin), behave pretty much like human opponents; yelling wisecracks, talking amongst themselves, and fighting with tommyguns.

Act IV: The House on the Edge of Hell

Responding to a call for assistance, the Stranger is dispatched to the remote mansion of Hamilton Killian, a retired Spookhouse agent with many of the same qualities as the Stranger (including an overwhelming hatred of monsters) and who, in his time, was widely regarded to be one of the organization's best monster hunters. Through a convoluted series of events, the Stranger is placed in a massive, puzzled-filled deathtrap and forced to face enemies from the game's previous 3 Acts who are also trapped in there with him.

The Epilogue

Once all 4 Acts have been played and beaten, a short 5-minute interactive epilogue is unlocked that thrusts the Stranger into a grim cliffhanger that paves the way for a sequel that has yet to be announced or released.

Influence on Other Games

The Nocturne engine was licensed and used to create the three games in the Blair Witch Project trilogy. The first game in the series, The Blair Witch Project: Rustin Parr, was created by Terminal Reality and featured characters from Nocturne (including the Stranger and Doc Holliday) investigating the Blair Witch legend.

Nocturne was also heavily influential in the creation of Terminal Reality's Bloodrayne game. The main protagonist of Bloodrayne, the half-vampire Rayne, is based upon the Nocturne character Svetlana Lupescu, and the first Bloodrayne game contains several references to Nocturne, including several levels that take place in the German castle from Nocturne's Act I.