Review for Nightmare Frames
Nightmare Frames is about exploitation, tropes, and Hollywood. It knows what it’s doing, and it does it well but fails to deliver something more than the sum of its parts. That’s not to say it’s a bad or mediocre game: its investigation keeps you interested, while the environments, the music, and the characters deliver charm (and horror) in spades.
Our protagonist is a disaffected writer in a love-hate relationship with the genre that made him famous: exploitation horror. He wants to be above it and hates what he’s good at because he doesn’t see it as a meaningful talent. He has contempt for people tainting the genre by taking it too seriously or not seriously enough. In other words, he’s a contrary son of a mother with a knack for shooting himself in the foot -- and aggravating others along the way.
Fair warning: Nightmare Frames contains depictions of gore and violence, with references to Satanism, cults, sadism, abuse... and pixel art. Regarding the potential horror: it scratches the surface whenever it comes across something genuinely terrifying, always moving to the next scene rather than letting a shot linger for a while. It lessens the impact, for better and for worse.
Other characters in Nightmare Frames range from charming and fun to despicable and terrifying -- and everything in between. They are the game’s greatest and most consequential strength; these characters are decently drawn, if a little stiff, but the environments make up for that by being vibrant and beautiful. The pixel art does provide a layer of detachment with a certain sheen.
A close second strength of the game is its audio-visual design. The soundtrack is inspired by synthwave, a genre that takes 80s synth music and puts it in an echo chamber. It uses tropes of 80s culture in a polished, retro fashion -- a solid choice for this game. The rest of the sound is what you may expect from a good horror adventure. The graphics are of a similar mindset, taking the retro pixel aesthetic while adding modern lighting effects and a considerable amount of detail in the foreground and background animations. Many of the scenes are stunning; its worth taking a moment to appreciate the attention to detail. Clever and dynamic, clearly this game works in the atmosphere department.
The game features no voice acting. It does give you a lot to read. In my experience, this was mostly an upside: I genuinely enjoyed the writing; there’s a rhythm to it. It’s not economical, but it has an original voice and fits the overall tone. One particular downside: it makes the remarks made by an omnipresent narrator blend in with the main character’s more mundane and ego-driven quips and observations.
Nightmare Frames plays like a streamlined but traditional point-and-click adventure. You can act and observe; it’s very dialogue-tree driven and has inventory and environmental puzzles. That is where the game runs into the limitations of using tropes for structure: it has all the classic trappings of the genre. Some of the puzzle sequences are weirdly arbitrary; though not of the moon logic variety, more like inflexibility in design. Not all of your actions immediately make sense, and the plot and protagonist dictate the course of the game -- as a player, you don’t get to decide much on your own.
The narrative is a mostly a coherent blend of horror tropes. There are elements of what is creepy about Hollywood: power and exploitation (in every sense of the word). Still, it doesn’t hint at anything beyond isolated transgressions -- or evil beyond comprehension. It's disturbing, but not often downright unnerving or uncomfortably real. It does depict suffering caused by both humans and supernatural phenomena in a way that might be off-putting to some. It becomes so classically horrifying that it almost doesn’t work as horror anymore. Yet it has beautiful and haunting locations, and its genre references are clever. Nightmare Frames' artful suspense and atmosphere saves the story, and succeeded in keeping me dreadfully curious and engaged.
