Desert Nightmare (English Translation)

The Review

'Pacing' is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of effective horror, because it's one of those invisible elements in a story. You might think of characters, or situations, or even themes, but pacing is so structural that people tend to miss it. Nevertheless, good pacing is essential to good horror, and the pacing in Desert Nightmare is some of the best I have seen.

At its most basic level, Desert Nightmare is a game about a spoiled teenage girl who finds herself abandoned in a dying Arizona town. It plays heavily with the themes of loneliness and alienation, and over time the town transforms--not physically, but emotionally. I don't think I've ever seen a game do this before.

Nearly all of Desert Nightmare takes place within the borders of the Silent Hill-esque Dusty Creek. At the beginning of the game, only a tiny fraction of the town is unlocked to explore. As the plot progresses, and the player gains access to new equipment, new areas of it open up. In a sense, Desert Nightmare is like a pop-up book. Or a nesting doll full of spiders. You never feel like you've left the town--you've only found a new corner of it to explore, and this reinforces the relentlessness of the game's mood.

Gameplay-wise, most of what Desert Nightmare has to offer is standard adventure game fare, but there's enough extra thrown in to keep things interesting. Although there is no combat in Desert Nightmare, there is some very aggressive running away. Occasionally, you will find yourself trapped in an enclosed space with something that wants to kill you. In order to escape, you have to creatively interact with your environment; knocking over tables, throwing switches, and blocking doors in order to keep yourself safe from your pursuer. Although most of these sequences pop up out of nowhere, they do all come with a save prompt, and the odds of losing hours of progress in the game are refreshingly low.

Speaking of which, Desert Nightmare is a fairly robust length. I clocked around five hours on my run, and this was with the help of google translate and the lamentably German walkthrough that comes bundled in with the download. There is potentially a lot of backtracking to pad things out if you don't automatically know the puzzle solutions, but nearly every puzzle in the game relies on common sense to solve. The only place where logic sort of gives way is later in the game, when you acquire a crowbar. Strictly speaking, rotten wooden doors should not pose a threat to that mightiest of bars, but--like every other item in your inventory--you only really use it once.

There's also a fair bit of recycling when it comes to music, although this doesn't detract from the game. Quite the opposite, in fact. Desert Nightmare only has a handful of tracks, but they're all very appropriate, very atmospheric, and keyed to distinct moods. The tracks loop beautifully, and it wasn't until the end credits that I even noticed I'd been listening to the same four or five songs all along.

In contrast with the sparse soundtrack, Desert Nightmare has a truly impressive number of animations and sound effects crammed into it. Every possible death comes with its own animated cutscene, complete with gory squelches, as do a number of puzzle solutions. To illustrate a point, how many 2k3 games have you played where the developer bothered to animate someone plunging a toilet? If you've played Desert Nightmare, that total should be exactly one.

The amount of attention that went into the visual presentation of this game is also exceptional. Everything feels like it belongs in the setting, from rusted-out cars to rotting slabs of meat to scarecrows wrapped in duct-tape and pounded through with nails. And where the limitations of the development platform kick in, the writing takes over. Desert Nightmare may not have stellar dialog, but it knows how to build atmosphere, and nearly every bit of scenery has a little bit of flavor to it.

My only complaint with Desert Nightmare is a plot-related one, and has to do with the fact that the game passes its emotional climax about 90% of the way through, but then decides to keep going. There's a quick final section that takes place outside of town, and that I felt wrapped things up a little too neatly for my taste. That said, Desert Nightmare is a finely paced, strikingly atmospheric adventure, one that transcends the limitations of the 2k3 engine and achieves genuine horror in a retro package.

Incidentally...

This game is translated from German, and if I hadn't read that on its profile page, I would never have guessed. AznChipmunk did an excellent job converting it into English, and there's only one nagging little signpost in the mines area that stands as a testament to its originally German heritage.