The Midnight Club has a beating gamer heart

polygon.com:

Netflix’s new YA seriesThe Midnight Club is the perfect horror starter kit. While there’s a central plot about a maybe-haunted mansion slowly unspooling across 10 episodes, it’s also a collection of short horror stories told by the story’s cast: a collection of terminal kids living in hospice at said mansion, bonding in their final days by scaring each other at night, Are You Afraid of the Dark?-style.

This means The Midnight Club can take any shape — in one episode it’s a film noir homage, in another, there’s a riff on The Terminator. And, in the fifth episode, “See You Later,” the show takes on the rarest of forms: the gamer thriller.

“See You Later” features a story told by Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota), who spins a tale about Luke, an aspiring game designer (also played by Sapkota; in The Midnight Club each cast member generally also plays the protagonist of the story they tell) who meets his idol in a video game shop: Vincent Beggs (Rahul Kohli), a legendary game designer. And even better, he invites him over to play a game that he’s currently working on.

What follows is a twisty sci-fi tale where a seemingly unbeatable video game is the means by which Luke learns that his world is not what he thinks it is, and that his heroic ideas about life and his place in it might be distractions from more mundane things that really matter. All told, it’s not really The Midnight Club’s best short story, but it does take on an air of poignance when held up against Amesh’s arc throughout the show.

Amesh is established as a gamer early on in The Midnight Club. In the group therapy sessions the kids all attend together, Amesh talks about his childhood playing every video game console that came out, and that he is sad that he might