Midnight Scenes: Among Graves

A Beautiful Setting With Nothing to Touch

Among Graves is the latest entry in Octavi Navarro's Midnight Scenes series, a run of short, Twilight Zone-flavoured horror stories told through richly detailed pixel art. This chapter follows the death of a young woman named Kate and the family secrets that surface around it, set against a small town with a hidden history involving something called the Veil and a family bloodline tangled up in it. It's the kind of premise the series has built its reputation on: unsettling, slightly folkloric, more interested in dread than jump scares.

What's missing this time is almost everything that used to make these games playable rather than watchable. Earlier entries in the series, even the more streamlined later ones, retained some sense of point-and-click interaction — examining objects, moving between scenes, occasionally solving something. Among Graves strips nearly all of that away. Reviewers describe it repeatedly as closer to a visual novel than an adventure game: long stretches of dialogue and narration punctuated by minimal player input, with no inventory, no puzzles, and very little to actually do besides advance the story. One reviewer put it bluntly as "a slideshow of a story rather than the usual interactable point & click," and it's a description that shows up, in different words, across a large share of the sample.

That wouldn't necessarily be a dealbreaker if the story itself carried the weight. It doesn't quite manage to. Several longtime fans of the series single this entry out as the least developed of the bunch — the central mystery around Kate's death is described as murky rather than intriguingly ambiguous, and the supporting cast doesn't get enough space to become more than sketches. One returning player who's followed the series since The Nanny and A Safe Place calls this specifically the weakest of the run, noting that the emotional hooks earlier entries relied on just aren't as present here. It's not that the writing collapses — the historical small-town backdrop is genuinely well-realised, and there are individual images and reveals that land — but the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts compared to what the series has done before.

Still Looks and Sounds the Part

Where Among Graves doesn't stumble is presentation. The pixel art remains the series' signature strength, and this entry keeps that streak going with detailed, moody scene compositions that make good use of the format's limitations. The soundtrack backs it up capably, leaning into the same slow-burn dread the visuals are going for, and the voice-acted dialogue — a nice touch for a game this size — comes across as solid rather than perfunctory. It's easy to see, just from screenshots, why the series has built the following it has.

The one recurring complaint on the technical side is an odd one: several reviewers flag the sound effects that play during conversations as tonally wrong, describing them as "unnecessarily funny" in a way that actively undercuts the atmosphere the rest of the presentation works hard to build. It's a small thing on paper, but for a game leaning almost entirely on mood to carry it, a handful of off-key sound cues do more damage than they would in a game with other things going on to compensate. The monsters fare similarly — multiple reviewers note that whatever creature design is on display here doesn't land as frightening, which matters more than usual in an entry with so little else to hold attention beyond its horror atmosphere.

There's also a thematic cost to how linear the experience is. The story leans on a message about accepting an unjust fate, and at least one reviewer points out that the lack of agency undercuts that theme rather than reinforcing it — if the player is never given anything to actually attempt, being told the character couldn't have changed the outcome feels less like tragedy and more like the game simply not letting them try. It's a sharper version of the same complaint that runs through the rest of the sample: a story built around inevitability works better when the player has spent some time pushing against it first.

Worth It Mainly for Series Completists

At a low price and a runtime most players clear in under two hours, Among Graves isn't a large ask, and the fans who show up expecting another quick, atmospheric chapter mostly still recommend it, even while flagging it as a lesser one. The recurring pattern in the review sample is a specific kind of disappointment: not "this is bad" so much as "this is a noticeably thinner version of a series I already like," and for anyone already invested in the ongoing story of the Midnight Scenes universe, that's probably still enough to justify picking it up, especially discounted. For anyone new to the series, though, this isn't the place to start — the earlier, more interactive entries do a better job of showing what makes these games worth returning to, and starting here risks mistaking a low point for the norm.

Verdict

Among Graves has the pixel-art atmosphere and moody sound design that have always defined the Midnight Scenes series, but it trades away nearly all of the light point-and-click interaction that gave earlier entries some shape, leaving a short, dialogue-heavy story that most series veterans consider one of its weaker chapters. Fine as a cheap check-in for existing fans; not the entry to hand a newcomer.