Waiting for the Sun

A review of "Marvel's Midnight Suns"

It can be extremely confusing and difficult for newcomers and die-hards alike to keep up with the sprawling, kaleidoscopic Marvel comic book mythos that’s coalesced over the decades. But as daunting as this vast fictional tapestry and its many surreal threads can appear at first, second, or just about every glance, it’s also a source of enormous creative strength. Indeed, one of the more impressive aspects of the grand Marvel mythos is the way it can be excavated and reassembled to generate a seemingly infinite variety of storytelling possibilities across a wide range of genres and media.

It’s certainly benefitted Marvel’s Midnight Suns, an excellent character-driven video game that taps this rich vein of source material and explores the more mystical quarters of the Marvel fictional universe. Where last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy video game dived directly into the deliriously psychedelic and cosmic side of the mythos, Midnight Suns leaps headlong into its lesser-known gothic and occult facets. Things start off spooky from the very beginning, with the player character known as the Hunter resurrected after a centuries-long brush with death. Matters only get weirder from there, as the Hunter fights alongside the Avengers and other Marvel heroes to prevent her very much estranged mother Lilith – aka the Mother of Demons – from breaking the elder god Chthon out of his celestial prison and bringing about the end of days.

If that all sounds absurdly bizarre, well, it is – and characters like Tony Stark and Carol Danvers (Iron Man and Captain Marvel, respectively) comment from time to time on the strangeness they find themselves in throughout the game. At heart, though, Midnight Suns is less a story about demons and Lovecraftian horrors and much more one about relationships and family as two bands of heroic misfits – the Avengers and the titular Midnight Suns – as they come together to save the world.  That’s reflected strongly in both the gameplay and overall narrative of Midnight Suns, as the Hunter befriends heroes from all corners of the Marvel mythos and fights back the forces of darkness.

As the game’s story moves forward, the two teams and their various heroes move from hostility and suspicion to respect and even friendship. In the game’s iteration of the Marvel fictional universe, the Avengers have already thwarted their fair share of apocalypses while the Midnight Suns - specifically assembled to deal with this particular end-of-the-world scenario - remain largely wet behind the ears. For that reason, it’s quite satisfying to watch the relationship between Tony Stark and Nico Minoru, a blood witch and former member of the comparatively recent teenage superhero group the Runaways, evolves from frustration and resentment to mutual regard. This particular relationship stands as just one of the ways Midnight Suns manages to gradually bring its cast of characters together over the course of its lengthy narrative.

Indeed, the characters of Midnight Suns fit together surprisingly well and complement each other despite their obvious differences. Familiar faces like Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, and Spider-Man appear alongside newer or lesser-known heroes like Nico, Magik of the X-Men, and Robbie Reyes, the most recent incarnation of the flaming-skulled Ghost Rider. To a certain extent, these characters resemble their portrayals in other media - but they’re not exactly carbon copies of versions we’ve seen elsewhere. While the game’s Tony Stark bears a fairly close resemblance to his cinematic counterpart, for instance, he lacks the same wounded vulnerability and, more superficially, sports a mustache rather than a goatee. The Captain Marvel we encounter in Midnight Suns is much more compelling and dynamic than the cipher played by Brie Larson in the MCU, and the game’s Doctor Strange comes across as fussier and more aristocratic than Benedict Cumberbatch’s proud and sardonic version of the character.

Learning about these characters proves crucial to building relationships with them during the downtime between missions – and building relationships with the Hunter’s teammates in turn proves valuable to players during the game’s final battles. Tony Stark and Peter Parker - Spider-Man to the uninitiated – both crack wise while each carrying the weight of their own enormous senses of responsibility. Nico and Magik, aka Ilyana Rasputina of the X-Men, give off obvious Goth vibes, while Captain America remains a straight-shooter and moral compass for the team. Thanks to this first-rate character work, the Midnight Suns truly earns what might otherwise have been an overly sentimental ending.

As for gameplay, Midnight Suns features an addictive card- and turn-based system for its battles. Each turn, the player can use a certain number of action cards drawn from their deck to attack enemies, heal and revive teammates, or perform certain tasks like looting crates and hacking terminals. It’s a generally balanced system, one that requires players to think about the strengths of the three heroes they bring along and strategies they’ll employ to achieve their objectives for the mission at hand. A bombastic score accompanies the game’s battles as well as its cutscenes, incorporating crunchy electric guitars alongside rousing orchestral cues.

For all it does well, though, Midnight Suns does have its fair share of faults and blemishes. Take the game’s graphics and animations, a strange mix of polished and seriously out-of-date. There’s an especially striking contrast between the game’s wooden facial animations and the obviously careful attention paid to its superhero costumes and combat moves. Iron Man flies with repulsors blasting, for instance, while Scarlet Witch levitates on crimson magical energy and Spider-Man swings across the screen from his webs. But beyond the occasional raised eyebrow and frown, it’s hard to detect much emotion from the faces of our heroes – but the game’s high-quality voice work more than makes up for this deficiency.

Then there’s the incongruous sight of superheroes duking it out with demons in the back alleys of New York or the ghost towns of the American southwest, all with the fate of the world in the balance. It’s part and parcel of the game’s design, admittedly, but it does make the combat in Midnight Suns feel rather small much of the time – especially given the aerial feats heroes like Iron Man and Captain Marvel can perform. The game’s combat banter also grows repetitive rather quickly, and hearing the same lines over and over again in a game as long as Midnight Suns can certainly grate on a player’s nerves.

While it can be hard for even avid Marvel devotees to keep up with the sheer amount of mystical and occult weirdness thrown their way in Midnight Suns, the game itself does a creditable job explaining the spookier side of the wider mythos to players as they proceed. Midnight Suns also requires a significant investment of time to finish just the game’s main narrative, enough to serve as a real deterrent to potential players. Still, these are relatively minor complains about a game with a narrative as strong and characters as compelling as those found in Midnight Suns.

In the end, Midnight Suns proves itself a worthy romp through Marvel’s mystical precincts that rewards even casual fans willing to take the plunge.