Why Bad Day on the Midway is THE Free Adventure Game to Play this Halloween

Bad Day on the Midway is a unique adventure game. It’s not original simply for being tied in with a band, given that Iron Maiden, Kiss, and Queen are a few of the major musical groups that have had video games released in their honour. It doesn’t seem, though, that there are many where the band itself has contributed such an original vision. The Residents, the long-running group of eyeball-headed musicians, created in 1995 a world as unusual as the rest of their art. It does what horror does best, plunging players into an uncanny parallel reality that is fearfully like their own. And it’s a video game for the ages: a twisting, moreish experience powered by a rare compassion. 

This game didn’t come out of nowhere, however. The developers, Inscape. previously released Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol, another band-influenced title with an unusual approach. It’s set over 12 in-game hours that have to be played and explored repeatedly, the bizarre story coming together in a very piecemeal way. Smart Patrol was a little repetitive and too abstract, yet also utterly unlike anything else on the market then – and still resembles few recent releases apart from its successor. Despite some savage reviews at the time, it’s clear now that Inscape merely lacked strong conceptual guidance.

It was the case that The Residents had significant design ideas heading in the same direction, having previously worked with artist and designer Jim Ludtke to create the adventure Freak Show. It wasn’t marketed as a game as such, but was a multimedia companion to their album of the same name. From a modern perspective, though, it is very much an adventure short story, letting players witness the performances of “freaks” before observing their more complex lives in their trailers. There’s a sad beauty to the contrast, like the outgoing host turning into a lonely, drink-laden romantic, or a literal supernatural blob having a rich inner life and a striking singing voice. There’s humanity and impact within its thirty-minute length, and the complexity of meaning that Inscape envisioned.

Experiencing Bad Day on the Midway for the first time makes you quickly aware of the imaginative talent at play. The concept sounds initially a little simplistic, with the main character seeming to be a boy called Timmy who gets to encounter a host of amusement park weirdos. Movement through the environment feels archaic, too, resembling a sometimes-imprecise Myst. The first thing that’s striking, however, is the inner voice that Timmy seems to have: text appearing exploring his thoughts and feelings on the day ahead. The second is that, if you aren’t aware of all the mechanics at play, clicking on another character and becoming them is thrilling. This is a title where appearances are consistently – and undoubtedly intentionally – deceptive.

It quickly becomes apparent that there is no real structure, no right way to play. Leaping between characters is compelling enough in and of itself. Each character has a range of thoughts: about themselves, their relationships, their environment. These characters reveal inner complexities that don’t materialize in their garish appearances, and a tragic lack of awareness that keeps them trapped within the park. Each line that emerges, especially in somewhat jumbled fashion, reads as affectingly as poetry.

This sense of discovery is embedded within the gameplay, given that you only have a short playtime before the adventure wraps up. Each playthrough will give you a different insight into a number of goals that the characters have, and it doesn’t seem like all of them are totally achievable at once. There’s murder, debt, and all other assortments of unusual happenings. Replaying the game is to rework the narrative each time, perhaps achieving one or a couple of goals whilst also getting a different sense of how these characters interlink. The actual square footage of the park isn’t significant, yet goals and narratives are stacked and interwoven.

Each character has been given tremendous attention to detail, which feels staggering – you might not even encounter all of them properly. They have animations bringing their backstories and motivations to life, the artwork designed by an array of known talents. It’s clear that this is more than just pushing the adventure game to its then-limits, but that other creatives have willingly joined another notable Residents project. The effect of all this ingenuity and variety does more than make the journey a little weirder, but gives greater richness to these people who might otherwise be perceived as “freaks”.

Some of the horror comes from the fact that these characters are not particularly moral. Fraudsters, killers, and fascists inhabit the grounds and, naturally, bring harm upon one another. However, the game doesn’t seem interested in any moral condemnation beyond portraying their odious worldviews. These characters are all trapped inside the park and also within their behaviours in one way or another, and flitting between their heads turns the horror into pervasive melancholy. Experiencing this world makes you pity the tunnel vision of those who live in it, and encourages complex, knotty empathy. It’s the empathy of novels and films in a way that can only be provided by video games.

Even today Bad Day on the Midway is unlike anything else in its genre. There are certainly plenty of adventure games that have philosophical depth, with Dreamfall: The Longest Journey giving players the chance to swap between characters and their contrasting ideas. But there doesn’t seem to be anything else that puts you so clearly in the heads of its cast, making the most of its medium by taking away the gap between character and player. There’s surely nothing else, either, that offers a narrative that plays out so differently each time, almost as a reminder of how knotted and unknowable life itself is.

Halloween 2024 is the perfect time to get hold of this now-freeware game (The Residents: Bad Day on the Midway - Infosite - F.A.Q. Hints and Tech Help), as it speaks to the unique horrors of our modern age. We live in an era where a tabloid level of certainty on morality seems to have become the norm, with evil being a label willingly slapped upon anyone. Experiencing Bad Day on the Midway is a reminder of the unhappy, confused, and desperate inner lives of so many, an experience of life that may become ever more prevalent in an economically unstable, tech-driven future. Perhaps the only way to avoid such a future is to engage in the game’s radical empathy. How many games might have you thinking about that, especially during Halloween, while still exhibiting the ability to blow minds nearly thirty years after their release?