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Neverending Nightmares Review

by Omar (@siegarettes)

Neverending Nightmares
Developer - Infinitap Games
Publisher - Infinitap Games
PC (Steam) and Ouya (reviewed on PC)
Rating - N/A

Neverending Nightmares is not fun. As I played it, it became a game I became reluctant to return to. From start to finish, it was an experience that left me feeling ridden with anxiety. That’s also exactly the way it should be.

Built as a conduit to channel the depressive and intrusive thoughts that creator Matt Gilgenbach experienced following the commercial failure of the studio’s previous game, Retro/Grade, Neverending Nightmares is grave deep in oppressive atmosphere. From the very start Nightmares makes it clear that the experience won’t be fun.

Waking from a violent nightmare, you begin to explore a house with what is probably some of the worst interior decor I’ve ever seen. The team has made it clear that they’ve drawn from the well of Edward Gorey. A macabre Victorian theme permeates the setting. Everything is rendered in a pen and ink handdrawn art style. All shading is achieved used hatching methods, and color is limited only to viscera and interactive objects. Even the fog of darkness is drawn in overcast lines and pen work. The art immediately gives it character, and when rendered in the stark detail of motion on your screen, there’s an unsettling beauty that isn’t communicated through prerendered video.

It’s the little details. From the way protagonist Thomas nervously shifts his eyes, to the subtle changes in decor. There’s always a spectre or movement you’re not quite sure you saw, or a detail in the environment that’s not quite right. Paired with the art’s heavy pen strokes and hatching, Neverending Nightmares’ environments are visually dense. There’s an emotional weight to it. Credit should also be given to the team for incorporating the various objects in the house seamlessly into the environment. When working with artwork where the artist’s hand is visible it can be difficult to cover the seams when putting it all together. Every environment feels as if it was a single hand made drawing, even if the reincorporation of objects throughout the game reveals otherwise.

While visually dense, Nightmares is light on interactivity. You have a limited set of actions. You can move, run and interact with objects highlighted by color. There are a few moments where you’ll have to find the right object to progress, and a few others that involve sneaking past or hiding from pursuers. At those times, Nightmares seems to channel the Clock Tower series. Grotesque, distorted, or sometimes even unseen horrors stalk the world, and Thomas’ intense vulnerability means that you never have the ability to confront them. Escape is the only option.

These pared back interactions mostly exist to draw you into a certain direction, or bring your attention to some part of the environment. Infinitap cut back everything except what was necessary to communicate your part in the world. What’s there is there to make sure it’s you that is responsible for the gruesome consequences of failure, motivating you to escape from their world of nested nightmares. It’s minimal, but it’s enough place you inside that world. By the time I reached the final chapters, I was glad that they pared it back. The oppressive atmosphere of Nightmares had made even the simple act of navigating an anxious ordeal.

That atmosphere is successful largely due to the excellent sound design. Don’t be fooled, there’s definitely some intense and graphic scenes, but it wouldn’t have worked as well without the paranoia permeated by the audio. Electronic and acoustic drones, distorted tones, whispers, muted screams and incomprehensible background noise all creates atmospheres as dense as the visuals. Thomas’ voice always wavers, never sure of itself. His breaths are sharp, heaving gasps for air. Enemies slowly announce themselves by the subtle buildup from the background noise (paired at times with some excellent use of controller rumble). There’s a headphone specific audio mode, and I recommend that you use it to take in all the details. Most importantly, the soundtrack never lets up. Even during quiet moments there’s a constant sonic miasma wearing down your will. Neverending Nightmares deals in dread, and makes sure that you are buying into it.

Of course, none of this is anything we haven’t seen before. In fact, Nightmares walks along the line of several horror tropes, to the point where it feels in danger of falling into cliche. Haunted houses, dark forests, and abusive mental asylums. We’ve seen it. It only manages to skirt that line because it feels like an effort to symbolically repurpose them, building into a narrative it slow hints at, until it comes to a head in the final acts. From here the game branches into a few endings, and each of them, for the most part, feel valid. There’s a lot themes explored: degradation and decay, a sense of being watched, loss of faith, and a continual descent. The last one in particular feels important, as it ties back into Gilgenbach’s exploration of OCD and depression.

Here’s the trouble: I’m not quite sure it works. When taken alongside the descending narrative, the structure of the game as a nested nightmare, and vicious and intrusive body horror, there is a thread that feels like an honest exploration. As someone with depression there were beats that I recognized, moods and images that were familiar. The anxiety and tension the game induces alongside the descent metaphor feel apt. However, I feel that most of it would be hidden if you didn’t have an eye out for it.

If a player were to do a blind run of the game without any prior knowledge, I have no doubt that they’d experience the same anxiety and terror. As someone fairly comfortable with horror I found it to be one of the few games I dreaded playing (Silent Hill 2 and Amnesia are the other two). I can read Junji Ito while eating lunch, yet something about the particular way the body horror was rendered here made me wince. Neverending Nightmares is an effective horror game. It paces itself well, draws out tension to stressful levels, and uses jump scares to keep the player on edge instead of overplaying it. It also works as a personal narrative, a look into the headspace of an individual in a dark place. Where it falters is in the framing. While it can induce the moods of these dark places, it struggles to communicate the everyday circumstances that can feel so crippling to someone who deals with these disorders.

Personally, I felt that while the endings left questions open, they gave too much resolution. They felt too clean. Even with support and knowledge you can’t become free from depression, only learn to live with it. In that way, one ending feels to communicate that better than the others. Still, the message can get garbled in the horrors that lead up to it. I’m not sure how many people will be able to take away what Infinitap wants them to.

Regardless of that, I did find Neverending Nightmares to be something that’s worth discussing, with plenty nagging questions to occupy the mind after it is over. Even for those who don’t engage with the subtext, it’s still an effective horror game. It will be on my mind for a while, though I’m probably going to be too anxious to return to it any time soon.