Not Tonight: Take Back Control Edition

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Not Tonight & Not Tonight 2 bundle, along with Not Tonight 2.)

Not Tonight: Take Back Control Edition is a management-focused Graphic Adventure originally released on PC in 2018 and ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2020, with this game’s style of gameplay very clearly inspired by the classic Papers, Please. This game is set in a post-Brexit UK that becomes increasingly authoritarian, xenophobic, and outright dystopian, and casts players in the role of a natural-born Brit whose citizenship is revoked due to their parent’s status as an immigrant, and who is required to work at a government-assigned job as a bouncer lest they be deported. For Americans like myself, the clear analog to this are the so-called “Dreamers”, the American-born progeny of illegal immigrants who our own Republican party seeks to eject from our country, despite this being the only country they’ve ever known.

Oh, did you want this review without politics? Because you’re not getting that – this is an inherently political game, so if you prefer to keep your videogames and your politics separate (not possible, by the way), you should stay far, far away from this game.

For presentation, this game uses a pixel art style that’s got a lot of personality, right from the start showing us a vision of London where the London Eye is in ruins, and with simple-looking people all bearing nice, subtle mannerisms, various locales with interesting animations bringing them to life, and muffled music of clubs and the like booming in the background. It’s somewhat simple, but highly effective, showing us through a pixel art veneer a vision of a UK that’s largely functional, but with dystopian rot creeping in at the edges, especially at your character’s assigned housing, a run-down apartment that looks almost like a jail cell, marked by slurs and busted furniture.

Much as with Papers, Please, players in this game are tasked with checking documents and either allowing or denying entry for various people lining up to get into the place you’re acting as bouncer for. Things start out simple, with you checking ID to ensure that entrants are of drinking age, but gradually expanding to include checking the expiration date, checking for signs of a fake ID, and keeping out blacklisted people, among other things. And much as with Papers, Please, this simple task gradually grows to become more complicated and ethically difficult as the dystopian nature of the world you live in becomes harder to ignore, and players are at times tasked with making these ethical choices while your own paycheck is on the line, and a missed rent payment can mean ejection from the country. And gradually, players will be tasked with choosing whether to support the law (and in turn, the conservative regime), or reject it.

The comparisons to Papers, Please are unavoidable, and because of this, the game’s satire is both more and less immediate. On the one hand, this is not some Eastern European failed state depicted here, but one of the nations we see as a bastion of freedom on the world stage. On the other hand, while I haven’t been to the UK lately (well, or ever), I think it’s fair to say that the reality of that nation hasn’t gotten quite as bad as the naked racism and nationalism depicted here… yet. Rather, this game can perhaps serve as a warning of what it could easily look like when a country chooses to value that right-wing nationalism over compassion and humanity.

One other issue here keeps this game from reaching quite the heights of Papers, Please, and that is that this game’s pacing is a good deal slower, and while that does give players more time to become acquainted with how it works, it also means that it takes a while for the satire of the game to seep into its mechanics and not just the insulting conversations your character has with their boss and their (for all intents and purposes) parole officer. The game also doesn’t throw in interesting twists as often as Papers, Please did – most of the IDs you’ll check will be standard with a few potential deviations, and only on rare occasion will you have a unique twist thrown at you (someone offering a bribe, someone trying to cut in line, etc.).

A few other things to mention before wrapping things up. This release on the Nintendo Switch is the Take Back Control Edition, which includes the One Love expansion, an extra chapter that has you ejected from Britain and trying to scrape together enough money in France so you can hopefully move back home. While this is a nice inclusion, I’ll note that one thing this game doesn’t have, and could have really used, is touchscreen support. As it is, the game’s controls work fine, but they don’t quite feel as natural as I’m sure a mouse and keyboard or a touchscreen would.

In the end, those who enjoyed Papers, Please and are looking for something similar, Not Tonight is probably the best game in that same vein we’ve seen, although it doesn’t quite top its inspiration. Those looking to get an (exaggerated) sense of what it feels like to be a native-born child of immigrant parents persecuted by right-wing xenophobia may find this to be enlightening, if a bit heavy-handed. And those looking for a management-focused Graphic Adventure that challenges players with ethical choices relevant to our current times should find Not Tonight to be very engaging if they aren’t dragged down by its somewhat slow pacing.

tl;dr – Not Tonight is a Graphic Adventure in the same vein as Papers, Please, putting players in the role of a natural-born British citizen in a post-Brexit dystopia. At risk of ejection from the country due to their parents’ immigrant status, the player is forced to work as a bouncer and balance ethical choices that come with the job against the need to earn a steady income. While this game doesn’t reach quite the heights of Papers, Please, it is nevertheless an engaging experience that fans of this sort of game will find to be a worthy successor to that game, even if its slower pacing drags it down a bit.

Grade: B

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