Nightmare Johnny

Name: Nightmare Johnny

Developer: Red-Cube

Story: Little Johnny lost his mother in a fire. Now he has nightmares every night. One night, his teddy bear offers to take him to his mother, but says it'll be dangerous. He'll need a weapon. Johnny takes his pillow and prepares to do battle with hordes of undead, goblins, evil teddy bears, and burning nemesis. Okay, this got really dark.

Writing: Very nicely written. The cutscenes are written in a way so that anyone can understand, like a child, but doesn't talk down. The story takes itself seriously without being unaware of its own nature. That is to say that story has something important to say, but never forgets that it's an adventure story taking place in a child's dreams. The game is a love letter to Gauntlet, Altered Beast, Ghosts and Goblins, Castlevania, and every other hack n' slash game that you ever grew up with.



Gameplay: Painstakingly creates a combat engine that has nothing to do with RPGs. You run through levels of hordes of enemies, rapidfiring the space or enter key to make your pillow hack and slash as fast as you can. It takes three or four hits to kill a typical enemy. Some enemies go down in one hit. The boss takes quite a bit to go down. Except for the final boss, all other boss battles are enormous hordes of the enemies you've been fighting in the regular levels. You also can press C to jump. This is mostly useful to navigate the map, but you can also use it to jump over enemies, which can be useful. There is a mini game stage that happens twice where you have to run down a hallway dodging fire. The obvious method is useless, and you'll die every time. It's easy to game this system. Don't try to move Johnny up and down. Simple wait until he gets right up to the flames, and then jump. Do not jump unless you're a space away from the flame. He won't get hit once, even if he lands in flames. Eventing and cutscenes are very well done, even though he often misses the mark by several paces, at one point, entering a door four five spaces before reaching it, and at another point, diving down blank screen when it's clear he's supposed to be jumping down a water fall that's at the edge of the map.

Graphics: I'm not sure where they come from, but they all look excellent. There are a few mapping errors: some I described in gameplay. At other points, corner tiles are incorrectly used, but there's nothing really worth complaining about.



Music: Every bit of it from Castlevania III. Yep. It fits very nicely.

Conclusion: I can't believe this game was released four years ago and has had absolutely no attention whatsoever. What are you people doing? Play this game right now!