Nostalgia can be a funny thing. After a hard day of watching the world slowly burn down from the tiny evil prism we keep in our pockets, sometimes we just want to enjoy something that feels like slipping our brains into a cozy sweater. But like any soporific, it’s best to monitor your dosage of nostalgia, especially when designing a game. Because where nostalgia prevails, originality can often take a back seat. And there’s no better example of this than FNTASTIC’s asymmetrical multiplayer game, Propnight.
Propnight lifts the majority of its gameplay from Prop Hunt, a fan-made mod of Valve’s multiplayer, Team Fortress 2. In Prop Hunt Players would turn into random Inanimate objects like tables, crates or barrels to hide in plain sight from one player who was equipped with a weapon and limited ammo. Essentially, it was hide-and-seek with guns. Propnight makes an attempt to turn this modded experience into a standalone game, but rather than refine the game’s pre-existing strengths they made the baffling decision of trying to graft an entirely different game on top by slapping on a sort of chintzy 80s horror veneer and swapping out Team Fortress’ Pyro with a cast of killers and specters in the vein of Dead By Daylight.
This in and of itself isn’t a terrible idea. Lots of good games combine disparate elements from other games, like Undertale or Hollow Knight. But Propnight lacks one damning thing that those other titles had in spades: Identity. And one need only look at the designs for its monsters to see what we mean.
Where Dead By Daylight had ancient hags, cowboys with harpoon guns, and CIA Torture specialists. Prop Night’s killers look more like the dregs of a Spirit Halloween bargain bin on the first day of November. Would you like to play as “Totally-not-from-The-Conjuring-Nun” or “Dime store Slenderman,” or maybe you want to play a vampire whose look was directly lifted from Resident Evil 8, and if none of those suit you, don’t worry! The game has not one but two flavors of generic killer furries. There isn’t any thought put into any of these designs. Prop Night’s killers mindlessly ape the horror genre without an ounce of originality or criticism. And this same philosophy of mindless emulation with nothing new or thoughtful echoes through its gameplay, and even its musical score!
Propnight is like a half-hearted Hollywood reboot, it follows the beats of better games and expects that to compensate for its lack of quality, style, or competent game design. As of this date, the game is sporting mixed reviews on steam in the wake of a re-work that seems to have done the spectacular job of pleasing absolutely nobody. If FNTASTIC is going to pull a No Man’s Sky and salvage this game, they’ll need to step up their production. But seeing as how they have already announced a zombie survival MMO in the coming year, our expectations aren’t high.
P. Arthur O’Driscoll is a pile of carbon and water in the vague shape of a 30-something-year-old from Missouri. He is a recent graduate from Southeast Missouri State University and has written indie games, comics, YouTube videos, news articles, and short stories.
