With a name like Nightmare in the Dark it’s safe to assume that we’re dealing with a delightfully frightening and downright scary game, right? Wrong. Well, that’s almost always the case when it comes to 16-bit (in this case 24-bit, sorry) games. Nightmare in the Dark was a late release for the Neo Geo arcade hardware and thus it’s a very rare and hard to find title. Today I’m here to take a look at it. Let’s find out if this one is a good choice to play in the season of pumpkins and candy corn!
If you’re expecting something gruesome or mature then please leave your hopes and dreams at the door. Nightmare in the Dark is a kid friendly game. The opening story scroll tells of an ugly groundskeeper at a cemetery. He notices that graves have been ransacked and bodies are missing. This is when he decides to patrol the cemetery nightly, and it’s a good thing he did because otherwise we wouldn’t have a game to play. Despite the story being about the desecration of graves it’s actually very kid friendly. It’s horror themed, but in a light hearted cartoon way.
I don’t mean to spoil the entire game right from the get go, but Nightmare in the Dark is Snow Bros. That’s the truth. It plays almost identically to the aforementioned arcade hit. If you’re a fan of Snow Bros then you’re in luck, but if you’re not, then well… you’re not going to have much fun here. Nightmare in the Dark is a single screen side view action game. As the groundskeeper you have only a few actions at your disposal. You can walk left/right, jump, and throw flames from your lantern. These fireballs travel only a short distance before falling to the ground, and this has a big effect on how you play. You have to get up close and personal to foes most of the time, or even slightly above them provided you’re the right distance away.
The gimmick here is that you have to completely encase enemies in flame. At this point you can throw the large fireball and it destroys all other enemies in its path. This allows you to create large combinations if your timing and placement is well planned. If you light them on fire you only have a specific amount of time before they put it out and continue on with their regular routine. The main issue that I have with this is with the trajectory of the large fireballs. They roll down hills, but don’t fall downward over pits. It’s a little annoying to be honest, and I kept forgetting this caveat and wound up wasting a lot of attacks. Snow Bros was better in this respect.
Enemies are all horror themed. You’ve got things like ghosts, blobs, skeletons, etc. It’s just perfect for Halloween. Unfortunately they range from boring to irritating. There’s really nothing in between. I really started to dread seeing the ghosts to be honest. They shoot projectiles that hone in on your location and follow you for a set amount of time. Given how slowly you move sometimes they can be a death sentence when there’s more than one. The stages just don’t offer a lot of space to dodge these. To make matters worse you can only take one hit before losing a life.
You’d think that Nightmare in the Dark would be a very difficult game, but it’s actually pretty easy by Bubble Bobble clone standards. You move very slowly, but so do the enemies. If anything the game is too slow in my opinion. Your character moves like they’re walking through molasses, and far too often you’re simply standing in place lobbing fire at enemies. You can get a few different power-ups that speed gameplay up. These come in the form of potions that either speed you up, of they increase your projectile strength or range. This is all fine and dandy, but the system is directly ripped off from Snow Bros. It’s identical, and I mean it. Nightmare in the Dark fails to carve out its own identity in nearly every aspect.
Boss fights mix things up, but again, the idea is ripped off from Snow Bros. These are larger and more complex encounters where you have to dodge the enemy and their attacks. Unfortunately you can’t damage them directly with your projectiles. Instead you have to wait for them to summon lesser foes into the stage, make them into fireballs, and then throw them at the boss. It’s very time consuming, and because these end stage enemies take multiple hits you’ll spend a lot of your time in these encounters. The boss encounters are well done, but they do little for the game in terms of originality. At least they do mix the action up and make things a little less repetitive.
At least Nightmare in the Dark is a great looking game. The backgrounds are highly detailed and are even quite colorful. The animations are detailed, but fall short of other releases on the platform like the Metal Slug series. There’s no scrolling because this is a single screen game, and so it’s hard to judge the framerate, but the action does hold steady. One thing I do like is the interface. The text that pops up displaying the stage you’re at sort of bleeds on the screen, and it’s a great effect. The soundtrack on the other hand is a little random. Sometimes it doesn’t fit the action, but at least it’s all high quality and sounds almost like it’s streaming off a CD. The sound effects are a bit barebones but they’re serviceable I suppose.
Nightmare in the Dark is an expensive and rare game. Add to that the fact that you’ll have to have a means to convert it from MVS to AES. That’s kind of a headache if you lack an adapter. This isn’t the game that’s going to make you want to do so anyway. It’s a simple Snow Bros clone. I love me some Snow Bros, but not enough to play and and enjoy every clone out there. You’re better off leaving Nightmare in the Dark alone.
