[LEGACY] Nightmare Never End

You wake up in your room and realize that something is very wrong. You’ve been tasked to review another horror indie game, and it already looks as if you’re going to be crying in frustration more than you are in fear.

In the last (or maybe first) review that you saw of mine, in the very first paragraph I mentioned the shovelware that has plagued Steam since Steam Greenlight was taken from us and “anything goes”. Well, here is your first example.

NMNE is a “horror” game, which in itself is correct. Any game which has the purpose of trying to scare you is indeed a horror game, but it spectacularly fails at doing so. Even trying to cut the game some slack by looking at horror sub-genres still greatly fails.

Survival horror? Yes, but either easily survivable or pure luck (based on unpredictable A.I. patterns and wall phasing).
Action Horror? Nah, not really.
Psychological Horror? It wishes, or at least it’s trying to be. It’s one of the many games where the protagonist is stuck in a coma, and it tries so hard to create this sense of dread but is entirely ruined by the next part.
Jump-Scare Horror. Which is badly done. Scares with no rhyme or rhythm. One of which, after being “scared” once, I know exactly what triggers the scare, which I then demonstrated that I knew as I had to replay the game when I got stuck.

There is no finer detail to this game. Every story aspect serves itself as it is, and it is what it is.

Pros: 

• The game works as a game (most of the time)
• Has grab and move physics
• Actually made me jump (once)
• I’m a sucker for trippy visualisations. Eyeballs coming out the walls, floating teacups, fleshy meatballs I need to stack into a bathtub? Love all that weird shit.
• The game has a beatable threat (most of the game) but doesn’t seem too unrealistic to beat or not beat, reasonably easy.
• You know exactly what you’re doing every time you’re faced with a “challenge” or scenario. Very self-explanatory, even though that’s probably just down to the game’s simplicity.
• When you die, you get sent back to the last stage or beginning of the stage you’re on. Very unlike most trash indie games.

Cons:

• I actually got stuck in the game twice, one was due to the lighting being terrible in a particular area that I couldn’t see the “solution” to the “puzzle”. The other was to do with bad A.I.
• Grab and move physics are almost overused, to the point where I need to make bathtub meatballs a SECOND time in the game. I love weird shit but WHY. The lack of other mechanics and odd tropes hammers this almost-overuse in.
• The game is not scary, honestly. The one scare that got me was because a bat flew into my face as I went around a corner. I didn’t even jump that much, but THAT was a proper jumpscare. The rest of which was The Rake, but like Shadowman squished up behind a door going *BSSHHHHHT* *Static Noises And Static Visual Effects*. I’m scarier behind a door making those noises.
• The last thing that I came face to face with (whether it was the end of the game or not) was biscuit collecting??? Every time I collected a biscuit, noises, and sounds were added, enemies with AWFUL PATHING were added and it eventually killed me. Unlike the rest of the game, it did not revert me to the previous stage, it bugged and game over’d me. At this point, I’d already restarted it once, so…

Overall, this game is not great. If you want to be scared, this is not it. It seems like a first attempt at a game with minimal assets and minimal effort or people who seem to kind of know what they’re doing but don’t know how to pull shit together.

But, this is not their first game, nor their first horror rodeo. AK Studio, the publisher, and developer of this game, has made 5 games before this going back to 2019. Albeit, one of them not being horror but a Crossy Roads clone, by the look of it.

While practise is patience and practise improves things, you have to pay $100 (I believe, feel free to correct me) to publish a game on Steam. While it is completely free to publish a game on Itch.io or Game Jolt, GOG, or Gamers Gate.

I’m not saying, “TAKE YOUR TRASH AND PUT IT ELSEWHERE.” It is a better business prospect for games like this, where you can get traction and feedback without having to pay out your ass just to see if people will buy your game.

Even so, despite traction and everything, you can even have someone famous review or play your games. One of their previous games, “Ghost Stories” was obviously seen by someone quite famous on Twitch as on Nov 12th 2020 the view of the game on Twitch spiked to 4.7k. Despite that, and despite all the LOL GAME BAD = GOOD REVIEW that came from it, not much else came from it. Obviously, enough money to try it again, but it lucked out, and it probably won’t happen again.

The reason I’ve spotlighted this game in particular is for one reason. If rubbish is highlighted and praised for its stupidity, you can fool anyone into thinking that the market is successful and a feasible means of making money.

Price: £7.19
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: None
Cards: No
Worth The Money: Yes, play it again and again.

This game’s base price is £3.99, discounted right now at £3.19. That’s not a steal, and I doubt there will be a price suitable for the “content” that it brings. If you can get this for free, good on you, but I have no clue why you want it. Jinx from the present day here, this is ridiculous. I’m checking right now if they’ve made any updates since on this game because the base price has been raised from £3.99 to £7.19 as of a couple of days ago. Yeah, just as I thought. No official updates of patches since release in December 2021. I’m not altering the rating or anything to suit, just thought I’d chime in on this somewhere.

Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.