Neverending Nightmares

I kept thinking about this one for hours after I put it down, which is either a compliment or a symptom - and Neverending Nightmares would probably say those are the same thing. Made by a single developer, Matt Gilgenbach, as a direct expression of his lived experience with OCD and depression, this is one of the few games where the design philosophy and the subject matter are completely inseparable. That alone makes it worth paying attention to. You play as Thomas, a man who wakes from one nightmare only to find himself inside another. The loop is the point. Locations shift through a Victorian mansion, a forest, a graveyard, and an asylum, all rendered in a stark black-and-white style that draws openly from Edward Gorey's crosshatched illustration work. Interactable objects are the only things rendered in color - a smart, unobtrusive system that keeps you moving without UI clutter. When blood appears, and it appears often, the red hits like a slap. The art direction is genuinely one of the most confident visual identities I have seen in a horror indie, and the soundtrack by Skyler McGlothlin - dark ambient pieces with titles like "Eternal Dread" - is the kind of work you want to experience with headphones and the lights off. The game actually includes a binaural audio mix specifically for headphone listening, and it earns that recommendation. Mechanically, this is about as minimal as a game can get. Thomas can walk, sprint for roughly ten seconds before wheezing to a halt, hide inside wardrobes, and interact with a handful of objects like candles and axes. There are no weapons. Contact with any monster means instant death and a return to the nearest checkpoint, which the game frames as waking from one nightmare into another. That helplessness is intentional - it mirrors the OCD experience of anxiety patterns you cannot break - and the first chapter, set in the house, makes that connection feel genuinely insightful. The asylum section that follows is where critics and players have consistently pointed to a loss of focus, and they are not wrong. The pacing loosens, the environmental variety thins out, and the repetition of nearly identical rooms starts working against the atmosphere rather than feeding it. The branching narrative leads to three distinct endings, and all three are worth seeing. A single playthrough clocks in around two hours, so completing all branches in an evening is entirely realistic. The endings themselves are divisive - some find them ambiguous and affecting, others find them abrupt and under-cooked. I lean toward the former: the deliberate vagueness about whether Thomas ever actually wakes up is the most honest thing the game does, and it sits with you longer than a tidy resolution would. What the game communicates about OCD - the compulsive loop of checking, the worst-case scenarios that feel indistinguishable from reality - is handled with more craft and less exploitation than most horror games bother to attempt. This is not a game for players who need combat variety, environmental puzzles, or a clear genre skeleton to hang onto. It is closer to an interactive short story with a soundscape doing a lot of the heavy lifting. If you already love the quieter end of horror - the atmospheric, introspective space that something like Silent Hill 2 carved out - Neverending Nightmares belongs in that conversation, even if it does not reach those heights. Go in for the art and the audio. Forgive the mid-game drag. Let the endings sit overnight.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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