Nightmare Boy

I wanted to love Nightmare Boy. A two-person studio from Madrid, hand-drawn cartoon visuals bleeding into something genuinely unsettling, a dream-logic world called Noctum where a kid named Billy gets possessed mid-sleep and transformed into a dark prince named Rolok - on paper this is exactly the kind of small, weird, personal project I root for. And for stretches, that goodwill is justified. Every zone has its own visual identity, the enemy designs are inventively grotesque (floating pig heads, candy-land areas hiding starving children in the background), and the soundtrack, composed by Vic Hernand - a musician with formal training from Berklee - does quiet, atmospheric work that the rest of the game sometimes fails to deserve. The structure is familiar metroidvania: one interconnected map, ability gates that unlock new areas, ten trapped children to rescue, each one handing you a new power when freed. The movement roster grows from a basic jump into double and triple jumps, wall-grabs, fireballs, and a handful of spells. On paper that progression loop is solid. In practice, the map gives you almost no incentive to actually explore it. Collectibles and meaningful power-ups are sparse, so most of your time is spent marching toward the next boss or the next required item rather than digging into corners for upgrades that change how you play. The genre lives and dies by the reward of discovery, and Nightmare Boy offers very little of that. The combat is where things get genuinely frustrating. Close-quarters fighting triggers a full screen-shake and a visual smokescreen that makes it nearly impossible to read what is happening - whether your attacks are landing, whether the enemy is winding up, whether you are about to die. Bosses are survivable but often require brute repetition rather than learned pattern recognition. Saving is deliberately costly: each visit to a save point demands an escalating gem payment, which is a novel tension mechanic in theory but compounds the pain of the already-sparse checkpoint placement. Die to a late-zone boss and you may be replaying a significant stretch of the world. The difficulty curve is also wildly inconsistent - stretches that feel tuned for beginners slam suddenly into spikes that will end a run without warning. I want to be fair to what The Vanir Project actually achieved here. This is a debut title from a team of two, and the artistic ambition is real. The hand-crafted visual work by Juan Garcai is genuinely distinctive, sitting somewhere between 90s arcade character design and fever-dream illustration. The story has a dark undercurrent that adults will read differently from younger players, and the choice-reactive NPCs hint at a more layered game that the writing and pacing could not quite support. At roughly four to eight hours depending on exploration, it knows roughly how long it wants to be. But knowing when to end and knowing how to get there are different things, and the controls - described across reviews as floaty, loose, or heavy depending on who you ask - never stop feeling slightly off. Nightmare Boy sits in that painful middle category: a game with a compelling artistic soul and a mechanical body that keeps letting it down. It is worth attention as a document of what a small, devoted team can build from scratch. As a moment-to-moment play experience, it asks for more patience than most metroidvania libraries will require you to give.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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