No More Robots are a class act indie publisher with a smorgasbord of critical hits already on their CV, from playing a bouncer in a dystopian present in the original Not Tonight from 2018 to hurling yourself down mountains on a bike in Descenders to a guy pushed to the limits of his morals in Family Man. Looking at the upcoming releases on their schedule, you can imagine this pattern is only going to continue, which brings us to Not Tonight 2 and the hour-long beta we got our hands on last week.
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Developed by PanicBarn, Not Tonight 2 is set in the very same dystopian present as the first game, this time we find ourselves in America and not jolly ol’ England. Kicking off on December 31st, 2020, in Seattle amidst a slew of protests, your friend Eduardo gets flagged as an illegal resident, bundled into a van, and shipped off to the Miami Gulag in, erm, Miami by the extremely right-wing group, the Martyrs. You then have 30 days to get his passport and family tree to him to save him from deportation. Thus begins a road trip from Seattle, across a very fractured and (hopefully) alien-looking USA to find what is needed and save your friend.
Along the way, you engage in text-adventure style dialogue with various characters, usually resulting in timed, multiple choice answer, situations which dictate where the conversations will go. You also have to perform ‘BouncR’ (an in-game Uber-style service for venues to hire bouncers/door-men) duties similar to the first game to earn money, find out information, and progress the game. This main mechanic still emulates that seen in the 2013 classic Papers, Please: person comes to you, you check if their ID etc. matches certain criteria, you let them in or not. All timed, and to a deadline that can be panic inducing at times, if not all the time. The Not Tonight games show how much more can be done around that formula, however. As the game progresses, you have more things to check to validate or refuse people — their age, ID expiry date, is the ID fake, dole out free poutine with sauce that matches a certain colour, pop balloons of people trying to sneak in over walls, check specific event tickets, etc. All the while, trying to find the correct documents to save Eduardo and discovering more about the socio-political landscape you’re playing in. For example, Montana is now part of Canada, Mount Rushmore is now “New Camelot,” and mushroom soup can be deadly. Oh gods, don’t eat any dodgy-looking mushroom soup!
It’s a fun game set in an interesting, though sometimes disturbing, world and the lo-fi 3D and retro style 2D graphics all look great and work well. I played through the beta a few times, managing to stretch an hour of gameplay out quite considerably, but without turning this into a full-blown review, I’ll say I found Not Tonight 2 to be very polished for a beta. I only experienced one bug whilst playing, and it didn’t break the game. With a demo out now, I’m sure it won’t be long until final release. I will definitely be picking this up on launch, and can’t wait to see what else Not Tonight 2 can throw at me.
Check out the Not Tonight 2 page on Steam to give the demo a try, and follow PanicBarn on Twitter for more updates.
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