These steps taken toward a more realistic and immersive world are commendable, but are not very well executed and end up making an already hard game many times more frustrating. But rather than be completely transparent in its rigid logic, it allows the player to pick up and use a lot of random items, some of which are useless to your progress, or worse, detrimental.

The game is of the adventure genre, and so is all about fitting items together at just the right place and the right time. If you miss your chance to act at a given moment, then that chance is gone forever. Characters walk about their scripted routines and events occur when they are supposed to occur, not when they’re triggered by the player. It has a story that develops in a faster version of real-time. To its credit it does a lot of interesting things, or at least tries to. This game goes against so many modern principles of design it’s almost like it’s from a different planet, or the year 1989. It will either become one of your favorites or it will swing your opinion a hundred and eighty degrees. If you are of the persuasion that modern games are too easy and are being “dumbed down” then I advise you to play Personal Nightmare. There are a lot of areas where it’s necessary to command the game to describe the scene in fact I’d say everywhere you can go it’s necessary to do that. The sad reality is that far too many vital details are conveyed as a few pixels on the screen which the designers apparently thought would be sufficient. It will show the player an image of a scene and reserve the textual descriptions for the things that its graphics don’t have the power to convey, such as complicated actions, facial expressions, or anything else important. Personal Nightmare’s main problem is that it doesn’t have the available technology to create a functional graphical environment but insists on using one anyway. In reality the game is predominantly a text adventure with some fancy graphics (which aren’t so fancy in the year 2009). The instructions claim that “most” actions can be done with the mouse, although this is actually a dirty trick to make you think that this game is more modern than it actually is, and to restrict your thinking to the commands listed on the screen. Every environment is represented visually on one half of the screen and described on the other half. Personal Nightmare is split in half by graphics and simple text, literally on the screen and in the gameplay as well. Waxworks used a point-and-click GUI and keyboard buttons to control the player and interact with the environment. Personal Nightmare anachronistically continues that tradition (Waxworks was made after Personal Nightmare) but through different means.īetween the development of the two titles a decision was made at Horrorsoft to change the genre slightly.

In my review, I berated Waxworks for its poorly implemented and frustrating systems. Both inhabit the very specific niche genre commonly called “survival horror,” although they existed before that term was coined. Personal Nightmare was made by Horrorsoft, creators of Waxworks (which I reviewed previously). Personal Nightmare, for example, simply murders the player right off the bat. Games today have the liberty to come in a lot of forms and sustain themselves in many different ways, so that cliché difficulty curve isn’t used so often anymore. This was naturally because the games could only be sustained through a diet of quarters, and demanding a constant flow of money from addicted players was the most effective way to separate a gamer from his cash. Please read my Interview with Andrew Brazier for more infos.There once was a time where games were designed to ease the player into the gameplay, get him addicted, and then proceed to murder him. In the late eighties and early nineties, our name changed to HorrorSoft and we produced a number of roleplayers, including the Elvira Mistress of the Dark series, both of which won several awards. AdventureSoft used to be Adventure International in the early 80s, and were responsible for producing games like Gauntlet, Gremlins and the Scott Adams adventures (like Spiderman and The Fantastic Four and stuff) - these were mostly text adventures you can probably find on spectrum emulator pages.

Personal nightmare horrorsoft