There is Spookhouse, a secret agency dedicated to hunting down monsters the world over since 1902 so people can sleep safely at night without fear (or indeed knowledge) of the horrors that exist. Their most successful agent is a mysterious man known only as the Stranger, the character you control throughout the game.

What has been dropping the jaws of gamers and even casual observers of Nocturne is the graphics and this is more than understandable. To say the least, they are stunning and unquestionably the best seen in any game yet quite simply because they almost look pre-rendered. Textures are incredibly detailed and rich in color, such as walls in the game's New York that have absolutely huge and rather authentic looking 1930s ads painted on them. Gorgeous shadows cast realistically up walls and other surfaces depending on lighting conditions. Bars are stocked with individual bottles. And laser sights (sorry ectoplasmic targeting systems) on the Stranger's .45 pistols and his torch even cast highly convincing lens flares when you face the camera.

The list of stunning graphical features is huge, and as a result, Nocturne is a veritable eye-candy store. As the game employs a static camera that changes perspective only when you move off screen, more processing power can be used to draw a scene so each one has hundreds of thousands rather than just thousands of polygons. Most impressively, Nocturne is one of the first games to do cloth mapping, meaning that the Stranger's long coat flaps about accurately in the wind and curtains move realistically out of the way as you move through them.