Released for free six years ago, the original No Players Online drops you into an eerily empty capture-the-flag-style arena. As you trudge through the concrete-covered setting, you wait for another human opponent to arrive on the scene. And wait. But none ever materializes. Turns out, you’re playing the game all by yourself—your only company a ghostly shadow haunting the arena. It’s a short game—an invitation to wander and soak in a few novel frights elevated by the grainy atmosphere of digital ruin.
Rather than simply create a more elaborate shooter with additional jump scares, the reimagined, commercial version of No Players Online expands the concept in a host of clever new directions. Its ghost story spills out from the polygonal map and onto a fully simulated computer desktop, complete with multiple login profiles, a web browser to access forum posts, and even a fully functional clone of Minesweeper called Mine Friend.
At the center of the story is still a downloadable prototype of a shooter, a work in progress haunted by a ghost in the machine. As you advance through No Players Online, you learn the secrets behind the shooter’s development, which are rooted in an occult-looking program that can combine the “souls” of two distinct games to create something new.
If, for one, you blend the crude swimming game Fishing with Knives 2 together with Mine Friend, the ocean backdrop of the former becomes scattered with sea mines. On the other hand, fusing Mine Friend with a Korean dating sim generates a delightfully bizarre experience where your minesweeping actions create dialogue responses on a date with a big yellow smiley face.
Never leaving the confines of its chunky CRT monitor, No Players Online brings its mechanics to bear on mood with impressive seamlessness. Many of the games within the game play out in smaller windows over the desktop, and you can even dig into their source files. The results aren’t particularly scary, but this No Players Online is a less straightforward horror experience than the original. Rather, it adopts the structure of a mystery, with the carrot on the stick pulling you forward being your desire to see what new gimmicks the developers have come up with.
A shame, then, that discovering those gimmicks is more enticing than the solution to the mystery. Despite giving us all the tools to root through the personal files of the story’s principle characters, any desktop investigation elements are sadly minimal; the game favors straightforward dialogue scenes of rote domestic drama, with scant details about the arcane programs that drive the story. Although No Players Online adds plenty of good ideas to an already strong concept, it ends with the sense that it never digs deep enough into any of them.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Streamers Connected.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
