Bad Day on the Midway

Adventure 1995 Windows inSCAPE Horror

What have I just played?!!

That's the reaction I hope you too will have after sinking a bit into this game! It's not the kind of what have I just experienced you'd feel you landed into because of a bad trip, but the kind that still manages to confuse and baffle you, but still entertain you and rub you the right way. At any rate, I guess, this is the psychedelic kind of game you get when an eccentric band is at the reigns of development. Storywise you get to experience a little boy's amazement at being left to wonder through an amusement park. Part like a psychological rendering of a troubled spirit spawned in the shape of an amusement park, part absurdist, this is a game you'll control as a regular adventure. There will be puzzles, there will be scratching of your head, there will be a bit of, oh, yeah, this was a cool or controversial subject in the early 90s and a lot of WTF moments, etc.! It's not bad, but it sure is an eccentric and at times too obtuse a game, so play it with a walkthrough, so you don't lose your patience with it. It's also a bit of a sad game, so make sure you have the proper emotional state not to get too tangled with it. Colorful as it is and flashy it can be a bit of a downer, especially towards the end. So be careful. If you want some other kind of cicus and fare game, see Luigi en Circusland, a sidescroller action game, less deep an experience, less potentially scarring, hehe!

Award winning game

Bad Day on the Midway is a game which won 2 awards: Best Entertainment Title and Most Innovative Use of Multimedia. But is the game really that good to deserve these awards? Released in 1995 and developed by Inscape, the game takes place in a carnival where the player has to solve various puzzles and try to solve different mysteries, one of them concerning a murderer and his backstory. The game is played in a first-person perspective, like in Myst, and the perspective can be changed between multiple characters through the game. The puzzles in the game are quite fun and the mysteries will keep you on the edge of your seat and will make you want to continue playing in order to find out what happens next. While the sound and graphics are great, the character models are sometimes disturbing to look at, but probably that whas their intention or maybe the technology back then couldn't render better looking models like in today's indie games. Overall, is the game any good? No! It's far better than that and it deserves the awards it received!

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