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In Nightmare Review
When The Fever Dream Takes Over .
Read Time 11 minutes
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Let us get something straight: as we know, there are games where, at a first glance, it is impossible to know what lies underneath a pretty, well-organized cover. In most cases, video game companies will, more often than not, try to showcase only the very best of what it is they have to offer, while hiding out of sight whatever uglier details they have that would grant them a near-instant pass by a huge portion of their target audience. Similarly, there will be times you'll see a game that sounds just too great to be true, and when you combine that with harsh critics, after a brief analysis of a single trailer, you can finally trace out why its reception didn't go as well as expected. While not fully applicable in the case of In Nightmare, the example remains more or less correct save for how it takes a little more than a single trailer and a few moments of experience to understand the reasons why such an interesting concept failed to reach to the skies.
“ ...Sleep deprivation has never sounded as appealing as it does now... ”
…
It recounts the story of a young boy with a disproportionate body-to-head ratio who finds himself in a coma due to traumatic events that happened in his early life, and now needs to put those to rest in order to regain control over his sleeping body before it's too late. Doing so will prove to be quite a challenge as dreams become nightmares and escaping from the child's subconscious mind without meeting resistance, put simply, won't be much too likely. A familiar-looking game that plays like and feels like the similarly named Little Nightmares, but that still remains a unique and distinct experience nonetheless.
For what it's worth, I think the game was delightful in its high moments and had a lot to offer, but fell short in its deliverance of a few key things, with most of them relating to gameplay, camera positioning, narrative and gimmicks, but don't worry as we'll be talking in detail about those a little bit later. To give credit where it's due, puzzles, for once, were amazing, and gave me a lot of trouble, but in a good-enough way that I can't hate them. The biggest problem I had with it was more so with how insubstantial and lacking the story parts were, meaning that you, yourself, shouldn't expect the entire game to be as enthralling or articulated as, say, any other game to have ever existed that wasn't developed inside the EA headquarters.
On another note, it's also a game that starts weird and manages to somehow end even weirder, as sparse notes and vague scenes of memories from the past with no dialogue whatsoever carry the much too important weight of conveying emotion, as well as telling us what is actually happening on the screen, leaving a huge portion of its blurry-by-default narrative in tarnished rags. Coincidentally, to pull a Miyazaki out of the blue like that without good reason didn't wind up doing the trick for me, as leaving such a lengthy story open-ended, with lots of it up to personal interpretation was more inconclusive and unsatisfying than, you know, tying those loose ends.
Just Pray You're Not Dirty Minded: Don't Allow Them Thoughts .
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Developer: Magic Fish Studio
Publisher: Maximum Games
Release Date: Nov 29, 2022
Platforms: PC
Genre: Storytelling, Horror, Puzzle
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Taking heavy influence from the likes of Little Nightmares, the game also showed an imaginative approach to its creatures, with some of its styling also resembling the title greatly. If not for the fact that both games play on completely different perspectives — this one in a top-down point of view, you could almost say they are basically the same idea, almost indistinguishable in direction, but executed slightly differently in terms of setting and setup.
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"Have you ever had a dream that- you um- you had your- you- you would you could do so- you could do anything?" To start a chapter with a meme quote is not something I thought I'd be doing any time soon, but here we are. As I mentioned before, dreams make a big portion of the game, and just like in real life, those same dreams can be very strange, not to mention scary as one's mind allows them to be. In areas, for example, you'll often find walls crumbling apart, the ground giving up to an abyss stretching infinitely below it, and corridors that give you the eerie sensation of being watched at all times... Despite their abstract appearance, these same environments are masterfully crafted with lifelike details, adding depth and heightening the creepy factor of the game to a whole other level.
And don't let me get started on creature design — how utterly grotesque and at the same time fascinating some people's approach to certain polygons can be so as to come up with no more no less than aberrations barring ridiculousness. From jacked-up eyeballs with infrared cams wires for optical nerves all the way to invisible tree barks that look like Haunt from Pokémon, the developers clearly didn't shy away from coming up with the most outrageous ideas to torment players. Taking the opportunity, sound, music, ambient tracks, etc. also contributed amazingly in giving us an immense sense of urgency, or that we need to escape at all costs, else, once caught, we'd be truly doomed for eternity.
But, despite all of this, to me, the scariest thing about the game, surprisingly, wasn't even the eight-foot tall ladies roaming the halls, chasing after our well-taken-care-of porcelain skin, heck no! It was the camera controls, or lack thereof, to be more specific. When we take into account that enemies can spot our character from a few yards away without us being able to notice their presence through sounds or other visual cues, this otherwise inoffensive problem got to the point where it'd consistently sabotage attempts at playing the game the way it was intended.
Undeniably extremely well ambianced, areas in In Nightmare consist of several fragmented pieces of the child's memories, some of which include a school, a forest, and a creepy abandoned mansion, among others. An area known solely as The Hall of Memories connects each region together, acting as the usual central hub.
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Undeniably extremely well ambianced, areas in In Nightmare consist of several fragmented pieces of the child's memories, some of which include a school, a forest, and a creepy abandoned mansion, among others. An area known solely as The Hall of Memories connects each region together, acting as the usual central hub.
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Jk, that effect goes away quickly once you realize that the sprint button is a real lifesaver. Just like in other stealth games where getting caught usually spells game over, running past everything works surprisingly well for avoiding risks, and while hiding in wardrobes, bushes, etc. to avoid threats also helps, it's nowhere near as fun effective as outrunning gigantic monsters.
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Jk, that effect goes away quickly once you realize that the sprint button is a real lifesaver. Just like in other stealth games where getting caught usually spells game over, running past everything works surprisingly well for avoiding risks, and while hiding in wardrobes, bushes, etc. to avoid threats also helps, it's nowhere near as fun effective as outrunning gigantic monsters.
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How can the camera being angled at an uncomfortable degree all day long be possibly scarier than monstrously-sized creatures, you ask? Well, it's simply because it is the only thing we can't hide away from, of course. Besides, call me weird, but I don't consider being threatened with a good time every so often scary at all...
While far from perfect, the game displayed several telltale signs of an incredible adventure, in line with traits from some of the greatest exploration-based games to have ever existed.
Arguably the worst thing about the entire game, what bothered me the most about it was the fact that there was absolutely no way to get around the inconvenience. Also, in being quite literally obstructable by anything and everything, while at the beginning of the game you won't really mind the annoyance that much, after a bit, once you start to realize you're unable to control its positioning and that your field of view is basically limited to a flying nymph (I still haven't been able to figure out what the heck it is supposed to represent, story-wise) that for some reason thinks of us as their center of gravity, you start to magically hate everything about it. And although the developers attempted their very best to soften the damage by making it so that walls become transparent once you're directly behind them, that still wasn't nearly enough to get the game on good grounds.
Unpleasantries aside, while I do think it's fairly abnormal for a 3D game to be so fixed on a single plane of view, and only adjusting/rotating when it feels like it, that, thankfully enough, wasn't such a big turn-off for me as it might be for others. Therefore, with the supposedly worst already past, finishing the game was only a matter of time, and, without glossing over the details, I hate to admit things, unfortunately, didn't get much prettier the longer I dared to continue playing.
But, for the sake of a fair and balanced review, I say it's better we leave whatever else I didn't find to be so good about the game for a little later... With that said, we'll now be redirecting our attention towards a more pleasant topic — things such as puzzles, secrets, mysteries, and, of course, everything in between! As you may expect, since those relate to a niche thing I'm not a huge fan of, there'll be lots for me to talk about, so buckle up, for, contrary to even my own expectations, the thrill of uncovering secrets here and there and solving mysteries for a change wasn't all that bad.
To Hide Or To Seek, That Is The Question: You Better Run Now .
In the topic of puzzles, in this world, there are only a handful of things that are able to get me more excited than a door locked behind whatever strange contraptions (bonus points if it's a giant mask latched by chains to a sturdy wooden door) put there with the intention of protecting its secrets from peering eyes. The mere thought that something marvelous or dangerous beyond comprehension is standing right there, an inch away from me, is enough to drive me nuts at times, without exaggeration. Okay, I might be exaggerating here, but just a bit, alright? Also, I have a tendency to see things barring my entrance as a challenge of sorts, but that effect goes away as soon as I remember that not every game gives its players the ability to turn on free flight mode at the press of a button using only a single console command.
Being a lot longer than it leads to believe, the game suffers from an immense lack of cohesion mainly due to its continuity being all over the place, which in turn influences negatively our perception and understanding of its world and characters, making so that moving on without such vital knowledge feel like torture.
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Being a lot longer than it leads to believe, the game suffers from an immense lack of cohesion mainly due to its continuity being all over the place, which in turn influences negatively our perception and understanding of its world and characters, making so that moving on without such vital knowledge feel like torture.
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Now, before we get too sidetracked here, the best kind of puzzles, to me, are the ones that can be solved by observing patterns, watching out for clues, and only then do we start to interact with whatever options for levers, cranks, and knobs said puzzle presents us. And even then, without a proper stimulus (rewards, in whatever form it takes), even the most reasonably fine of them fall flat in my fun-o-meter, in terms of me having the drive to piece them together. Or, worst of all, an apparatus where you have to somehow rationalize the randomest sh*t ever to unlock a passageway, which is arguably the dumbest way I can think of for puzzle-makers to expect their creations to be solved.
With a great portion of the game consisting of escape sequences in conjunction with hiding sequences followed by a locked door/gate at the end that has no reason to require a key found on the other side of the planet to unlock other than to make players want to commit seppuku on the spot, alongside semi-useless short scenes that shows us 5-7 points of interest at once with no chance for us to remember where everything is unless the person playing has photographic memory, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say In Nightmare could've handled setting us up to vault breaking like a true burglar slightly better.
Examples of what I consider non-dumb ways to solve any given puzzle include items such as bulbs, arrows, numbers, and geometric forms, all of which are indicative of a quality puzzle that tells us what to do, without being explicitly obvious about it. Basically any kind of component that isn't completely random or far from the puzzle itself that it can feel almost unrelated unless you're paying extremely close attention to the smallest of details. stuck. illogical
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Examples of what I consider non-dumb ways to solve any given puzzle include items such as bulbs, arrows, numbers, and geometric forms, all of which are indicative of a quality puzzle that tells us what to do, without being explicitly obvious about it. Basically any kind of component that isn't completely random or far from the puzzle itself that it can feel almost unrelated unless you're paying extremely close attention to the smallest of details. stuck. illogical
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