Midnight News Report Review

A Late-Night Broadcast That Won't Let You Look Away

Midnight News Report launched September 16, 2026 from first-time solo-feeling studio Lunarbound Games, casting the player as an insomniac flipping channels who stumbles onto a late-night news broadcast that shouldn't exist. Advertised as roughly a 90-minute horror experience across three evolving environments, it mixes light exploration, stealth, and puzzle-solving as the broadcast itself starts warping the world around the viewer. At $6.99, it's a tiny release that launched to a genuinely tiny English review pool of 8 reviews, 6 positive, all 8 read in full for this review, two of them written in Indonesian despite being filtered under Steam's English-language tag, both translated faithfully below.

The Selling Point Reviewers Kept Repeating Back: No AI, Nothing Borrowed

Lunarbound Games' own store page makes a specific, pointed claim: "All completely original visual assets, environments and character models. No Unity store assets or AI used." That claim didn't go unnoticed. "The fact that no AI was used in the making of this game is refreshing!" one reviewer wrote, while a second, separately, called out the exact same detail: "This was so fun to play!! I was genuinely scared the entire time. Would absolutely recommend. Also LOVE the fact that there's no AI." A third reviewer framed it as part of a broader impression of craftsmanship, writing that they "loved the story and all the love that was put into painstakingly making every part of this game from scratch," despite having to "brute force one of the puzzles" along the way. Two independent reviewers, unprompted by each other, singling out the exact same disclosed production detail is enough to treat it as a real selling point rather than an isolated compliment, and it lines up with the studio's own advertised claim rather than contradicting it.

Scares, Puzzles, and an Anchor Nobody Trusts

Set that specific praise aside and the reception settles into fairly standard, well-earned horror-game compliments. "It'll only last you about an hour, but you'll get scares, puzzles, varied environments (and a very sinister news anchor)," one reviewer wrote, calling it "a very solid and very creative horror game." Another praised the puzzle difficulty curve specifically, writing that "the puzzles were a perfect amount between easy and tricky," while a reviewer who called it the studio's "first game" said "you can tell this was a labor of love" and that they were "excited for more." A sixth reviewer kept it simple: "Fantastic game. Fantastic Atmosphere." Across the positive reviews, the game's short runtime is treated as a feature rather than a shortfall, several reviewers explicitly noting they finished in roughly an hour to ninety minutes and came away satisfied with the pacing rather than wanting a refund for the length.

The One Complaint That Shows Up on Both Sides of the Review Pool

What makes this pool worth reading closely despite its size is that one specific technical complaint, sound balancing, shows up independently across reviews that otherwise landed on opposite sides of the recommend/don't-recommend line. Among the positive reviews, one mentioned "a couple of little technical issues" without elaborating, but a second was more precise: "There art a couple sound balancing issues (very loud sound effects) toward the beginning of the game." The more detailed of the two negative reviews (translated from Indonesian) opens with the identical complaint stated more bluntly: "in some parts, the sound suddenly gets very loud and hurts the ears, making it uncomfortable." That same negative review goes on to raise issues no other reviewer echoed: a snow-area puzzle with unclear clues that requires wandering a large, dark map while the player character moves frustratingly slowly, flashlight brightness that reflects harshly off nearby objects when turned up to compensate for the darkness, and, most seriously, a bug encountered during a puzzle in the news-broadcast area that soft-locked their progress, leaving only a return-to-main-menu option and forcing a lengthy puzzle to be redone from scratch, a frustration substantial enough that the reviewer says they stopped playing at that point rather than finish the game. A separate, much shorter negative review offers no detail beyond calling the game "rambling" or "nonsensical" (a rough translation of the original Indonesian). Between a corroborated sound-mixing complaint and one detailed, uncorroborated account of a progress-blocking bug, this is a small pool with real rough edges alongside its genuine praise.

Verdict

Midnight News Report is a short, cheap, clearly hand-made horror game that delivers on its own modest pitch: an unsettling hour or so of exploration and puzzle-solving built around a genuinely creepy central conceit, with a review pool that keeps crediting the developer specifically for building it from scratch rather than leaning on stock assets or AI shortcuts. It isn't polished all the way through, a recurring sound-balancing issue and at least one account of a puzzle-breaking bug are real complaints worth weighing, and the negative end of its small review pool suggests some players hit friction the positive reviewers didn't. The content descriptors on its own store page, warning of blood, gore, and "generally unsettling themes," line up honestly with what reviewers describe rather than overselling or underselling the experience, which is worth noting for anyone deciding whether a 90-minute horror game is worth their evening. But for a first outing from a new studio, at a $6.99 price built around a single sitting's worth of content, most of the people who've played it came away scared, satisfied, and rooting for whatever Lunarbound Games makes next.