This month for the retro game club, the biggest Saturn fan I know chose–to the surprise of no one–the archetypal Saturn game. Sonic Team’s first 3D venture is imaginative and unique, but doesn’t quite succeed on all its aims.

I’ll admit I didn’t play the game as it was intended. Nights is supposed to be run again and again, as a player learns level layouts and masters the complex mechanics, while also soaking in the dreamlike world. I on the other hand cheesed through it with savestates. I did appreciate the off-kilter aesthetics and the unusual structure, but had some trouble immersing myself in it due to the demanding nature of progression.

Let me explain. In Nights you play as one of two sleeping children who finds themselves transported to a magical land where they help Nights fight back against the cruel wizard Wizeman. The genderless Nights does this by flying gaily around courses, in a 2D plane that winds through a 3D world, trying to capture fragments of emotions or something from strange machines, which eventually lets you fight a boss made of nightmares. I think. What you actually do is try to fly smoothly, collecting diddly-bops and going through rings, to get a good score while not letting time expire. The pressure to perform a perfect run is high but is part of the expected loop for a player; you have to enjoy score-chasing to some extent.

The biggest problem with this system is that although the normal gameplay of flying around is fun, the boss fights are too obscure. After completing a whole level of four courses, the last thing you want is to have no idea how to damage a boss and be sent back to do it all again–or even worse, to complete it but too slowly such that your rank is insufficient to unlock the game’s ending (this is where the savestates come into it). Again this rewards repeated play but I feel the punishment is too harsh while you’re in the process of learning.

There’s other stumbling blocks at play though. Pop-in of level geometry and camera control are problems when initially exploring a stage as the child (something that is a nice change of pace but clearly not what the game was designed around). The Nights segments are crying out for a wider field of view. And the graphical effects were, shall we say, ambitious for the time and the system–although I do have a soft spot for pointy polygons, pre-rendered sprites, and low-fi textures.

But this is mainly surface-level stuff. I do have deeper problems with the game’s high demands but it’s still special, it’s still worth it. The joyous final level and the fun end credits vocal song are great… too bad motivation doesn’t work retroactively, as the learning curve could be a barrier to this. The HD release is I think a huge improvement on fulfilling the game’s vision; too bad it’s missing a couple of details (and the all-important savestate function of a Saturn emulator).