Nightmare 4 (Fear)

This game is very much like the film The Cube. Except of course that you don't play a resourceful main character instead you play one of the hundreds of people that died there.

Actually scratch that. You play hundreds of the hundreds of people that died there.

The game has a couple of good points. The atmosphere really works. It's creepy and empty and it has the right vibe to it. But that's about all it has going for it. In this game you'll spend more time looking at the death animation than actually playing. This game is riddled with bad game decisions. It sort of reminds me of those really old games where you had no instructions and everything you did killed you. There's a certain nostalgic factor in that for some players but most players by now no longer want those things.

Essentially I consider instakills over and over to be bad game design. I'm sure others may disagree but when survival is dependent on repetition rather than skill I tend to dislike it.

This game also has a lot of repetition. It's a bunch of rooms looped over and over, once you learn all the rooms avoiding the traps will be a piece of cake but there's still little point to wandering around until you stumble upon something that may (or may not) happen. Or more likely something that may (or may) kill you.

In the instructions at the beginning it says that when an exclamation mark appears you're supposed to mash the enter button and that's where a bit of bad controls come in too. I'm sure there's some "right way" of doing it but 90% of the time I mashed the enter button at an exclamation point nothing happened.

As a conclusion this is a game filled with repetitive trial-and-error gameplay, wonky controls and a nice atmosphere.