The Nightmare Journey is a curious mystery puzzle game that will confuse and interest you, but not in the way you’d think.
The Nightmare Journey is a very odd game, to say the least. Developed by only two people Luiz Felipe Da Silva Marian and Nil Rocha, who is the artist behind the game’s art. The game is published by MushRoom Angels games and explores a man’s fears and will have you questioning every moment.
You play as Arthur, no not that one, who seems have woken up in this strange nightmarish world. Where on Earth has Arthur woken up? Why is everything so dark? These will most likely be the first few questions floating in your mind, but there will be plenty more to come. You will have to explore this nightmarish place, solving puzzles and trying to figure out what the heck is going on and how did Arthur ended up here.
As mentioned earlier, The Nightmare Journey is a very odd game and not because of its relatively tiny development team but rather because the game is an interesting mix of point-and-click adventure mixed with 2D side-scrolling mystery puzzles.
Players will have to move their cursor around the environment and search for any clues or points of interest. You will have to then move Arthur to said point of interest in order to interact with it. This is also one of The Nightmare Journey’s most notable issues that can and will become incredibly tedious, especially as Arthur’s movement speed isn’t the fastest and he takes a while to complete simple actions.
The Nightmare Journey does, however, do something rather interesting with how Arthur interacts with his environment. You see, your cursor acts as a point of interest; whatever your cursor sits on, Arthur will move his head, so he faces it. This makes it seem like he is actually investigating his environment along with us.
Another one of The Nightmare Journey’s strengths is the game’s puzzles. The puzzles aren’t necessarily difficult, they still give you a bit of a challenge, but it’s nothing a puzzle game veteran couldn’t solve. The strength of the puzzles is the way the game presents them, or lack thereof. You see, the game doesn’t tell you anything. The player isn’t given many clues to go on, and this incentivizes them to explore their environment fully and thoroughly to find the solutions to the puzzles. This mystery does have a downside, and it’s a downside that drags the game….well, down.
As mentioned before, the game tells you nothing, absolutely nothing. From the moment your character wakes up, you are told absolutely nothing about where you are or what you are doing. Heck, you only find out that your character has a name if you check the game’s Steam page. The mystery isn’t a bad thing, and many games do it to strengthen their plot and use it as a way to encourage players to continue further in hopes of figuring out the mystery. But The Nightmare Journey does not do that.
You are not given any explanation about anything, from controls to puzzles to location; players are kept in the dark. This might be meant to immerse ourselves in Arthur’s shoes and make us relate to him, but we are told nothing about him or what his wants and desires are. Players cannot sympathize with something when there is nothing to sympathize with.
The lack of any information given to players doesn’t just negatively impact their connection to the player character but also affects the gameplay. The Nightmare Journey would’ve been excellent if it was just a simple puzzle game, but for some odd reason, the game throws in bosses and combat mechanics. This will also be the first time that players will learn that Arthur have a health bar.
The sudden implementations of combat mechanics don’t bring anything beneficial to the game and, in fact, bring the game down because these mechanics are both unnecessary and underdeveloped and feels tacked on to make The Nightmare Journey feel more like “a game.” If the developers wanted to add more to the game, they should have spent more time improving the game’s puzzles rather than a half-baked combat system that feels clunky and disconnected from the rest of the game.
The lack of any story, context, or character development doesn’t make you want to figure out the game’s mystery; instead, it makes you want to figure out why you are still playing the game. This is a pity because The Nightmare Journey is an incredibly beautiful game.
Possibly, one of the game’s greatest features is its art style. The game’s artist Nil Rocha has done an absolutely brilliant job with the game’s art, which mixes jagged lines and deep shadows with vibrant watercolor and contrasting colors. The world of The Nightmare Journey feels dreamlike and hazy; the changes in environments and style are sudden and random, exactly how the environment changes in your dreams.
This beautiful dreamlike art makes you feel as if you are stuck in Arthur’s nightmares and dreams. This immersion is further strengthened by the atmosphere the game gives each level. Each level in The Nightmare Journey is completely different from the rest and thus, so is the atmosphere of each level. Some levels are claustrophobic and restrictive, and the game makes sure you feel it by giving those levels these banging and clunking sounds that surround you making you feel the fear that each level is supposed to represent.
To wrap things up, The Nightmare Journey is a game that is incredibly beautiful and accurately shows what the world of our dreams and fears looks like. The game has a masterful use of ambiance and atmosphere. While its puzzles are simple to figure out, the game doesn’t make the puzzles obvious.
This lack of telling players what to do does give the game an air of mystery; it is also the game’s biggest weakness. The game gives you no instructions on how to play, and instead of intriguing the player, it just confuses and annoys players and doesn’t give them much of a reason to continue playing it.
The Nightmare Journey is a game made by only two people, so you should give it some slack. If you want to experience the game because of its art, it’s more worth your time to find artwork of the game’s artist instead of playing a game that will leave you with more questions than answers and not in a good way. The Nightmare Journey is currently available on Steam.
