Developed over the course of seven years, Whalestork’s The Night is Grey uses non-traditional point and click mechanics and complex puzzles to grapple with serious themes.

Finnegans Wake, one of Irish author James Joyce’s seminal books from the 20th century, is revered in the literary world for its complexity and style. Researchers and even scientists have spent decades deciphering and decoding the, at most times, seemingly nonsensical structure and content. 

Most notably though, the opening of the book starts mid sentence, highlighting the novel’s cyclical nature and its themes of time and history. However, Joyce was most criticized for the book’s lack of convention, mishmashing common language into his own unique idioms. 

Breaking with convention is what most professional storytellers of the past would caution against, yet Finnegans Wake became iconic for leaning into that space of creative liberty.

Today, storytellers find ways of either breaking with, or clinging to, tradition in film, music, and even video games. Independent video game developers have especially been known to do the former, introducing players to characters and worlds not often seen in mainstream titles. 

Whalestork’s bold and jarring The Night is Grey takes a page out of Joyce’s book, and does so in more ways than one that leaves you wondering about time, history, and the opaqueness of morality. The conventions of a typical point-and-click game only sparingly appear between complicated puzzles and an astounding soundtrack, not to mention the ASMR worthy noises throughout.

Director André Broa wrote the game’s story and screenplay alongside Taigo Fragoso years ago, but the limited resources available to Whalestork, and a world changing pandemic in 2020, pushed the game’s release date multiple times.

“With a near zero dollar budget, we pushed it and pushed it,” Broa said in a phone call. “Maintaining the team’s spirit was a challenge because of the delays, and we worked for the last seven years to perfect the story.”

In The Night is Grey, you play as Graham, an anxious and isolated man who stumbles out of a random forest after he flees a pack of wolves. After coming upon what we think is an abandoned cabin, Graham ends up meeting a young girl named Hannah whose mother hasn’t returned for the night. What follows is a sprawling deluge of side quests and tasks to help get this girl to her mother before the wolves descend on them both. This all happens in the middle of a small town ravaged by a mining company’s exploitative practices and damning coverup we come to learn in a devastating second act. 

But what we also come to learn about Graham, as well as what drove him out of that very forest, is what makes The Night is Grey so jarring and bold. It contends with questions of family trauma, sexual abuse, and violence against women. Its ending subverts all the expectations players went into the title with and burns slowly and steadily without more than a few overtly heavy scenes.

The art direction drives the unsettling atmosphere that Whalestork aimed for, and the demand came by way of the thousands of hand illustrated scenes Broa and his team needed to create. Together they drew some 6,000 drawings for the main character alone and made sure the organic feel of a hand-drawn background resonated throughout. For them it was nerve wracking, as is the nature of independently developing your first video game.  

Still, Broa and his team are glad the game is finally in the hands of players. “One of the most important things I learned through this process was to keep at it and don’t lose hope,” Broa said. “We believed in this story and knew that we needed to keep at it. You’ll always be fulfilled after completing a project like your very first game because you tried, made it from the very start, and finished it.” 

The Night is Grey serves its purposes in giving players a story to sit with well after the credits roll. It’s a testament to the heart of indie development and the people willing to engage with stories that jar us and leave us with questions. 

The game is out now on PC and Mac.