In Nightmare

I want to root for In Nightmare. The concept earns it: a young boy named Bill, unconscious in the real world and hospitalised for severe depression, works through the wreckage of his childhood by pushing through a series of dreamscapes shaped by his worst memories. Divorce, a dismissive stepmother, school bullying, a household held together by a child's desperate emotional labour. These are heavy subjects, and the game does not flinch from them. Notes and ghost-like flashbacks scattered across the levels do most of the narrative heavy lifting, and if you take the time to find them, the story that assembles itself is genuinely moving. That emotional sincerity is the reason to play this, and I would not dismiss it. The world Magic Fish Games built around that story is also, in patches, quietly beautiful. Bill traverses dark wooden mansion halls, a damp boiler room, a sterile hospital corridor, and a crystalline cave, each space representing a different chapter of his memory. The isometric camera leans into a slightly cartoonish aesthetic that keeps things surreal rather than grimy, and the lighting work is the star of the whole production. Bikti, Bill's golden butterfly companion, doubles as a flashlight and a sonar tool you control with the right stick, casting just enough glow to make the surrounding dark feel alive. The soundtrack earns a separate mention too: it shifts from eerie, childlike ambience during exploration to something more urgent during chase sequences, and it manages to hold a childlike atmosphere without becoming comforting. That tonal precision in the audio is the mark of a team that cared. Here is where the honesty is owed, though. The stealth and chase mechanics that fill most of the runtime are where In Nightmare comes apart. Enemy detection is erratic, with monsters sometimes triggering a game over from off-screen with no warning. Chase sections repeat the same corridor-sprint logic so many times that the tension empties out of them. The butterfly companion's active abilities, which should enrich the stealth, drain through consumables so fast that most players end up ignoring them. The puzzles themselves sit on a wide quality spectrum: a rotating-chamber puzzle midgame is exactly the kind of spatial reasoning the game needs more of, while the majority of objectives reduce to fetching a battery or pulling a switch while an enemy circles nearby. The fixed isometric camera adds orientation frustration on top of everything else. On the PC version specifically, the Steam user response sits at a notably positive rate despite the roughness, which suggests the audience willing to engage with the story finds enough there to justify the runtime. The six-hour runtime is, in a way, the game's most honest feature. It knows when it is done. For players coming specifically for the atmosphere, the soundscape, and the emotional texture of Bill's journey, there is real material here. For players hoping for a tightly designed stealth-puzzle game to match the mood, the execution is not there.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on In Nightmare.