Desert Nightmare (English Translation)

So, a while ago, I wrote a review of this game. I gave it two stars and mentioned that it was very overrated while not really presenting a particularly well written arguement, mainly due to the fact that something near the end really frustrated me and made me salty about the game.

Recently, I thought of giving the game another go, see if it was really worth the hate I gave it. And now with the old, rude review gone, it's time to give this game a much more fair and constructive lookover to see if it really is a bad game after all.

And I'm pleased to say that the answer is no. Upon replaying the game, a lot of things actually really grew on me.

Let's start off with my favorite aspects of the game - the visuals and the atmosphere, and boy are these strong. I straight up first gotta mention that I adore Desert Nightmare's setting. It's a small town where weird shit goes down, a premise that I am very fond of. There's a variety of bizarre things you will encounter ranging from an ape like monster to one without legs to even the inhabitants themselves going after you.



And man, those visuals are really something. The game has a very strong recognizeable look to itself. They accompany the game's rather grim atmosphere well. And dude, the atmosphere is set up greatly. The inhabitants feel very lifeless and something about the town just really feels off. There was little of issue to be found here for me.

I guess the only thing I could really complain about is that some of the NPCs looked too similar to each other, leading me to gettting them confused. Nearly every time a male NPC popped up, I thought it was Jake, one of the main characters, because their clothing and hair style is just too similar.



And while we're on the topic of the game's presentation let's quickly talk about the game's soundtrack. Sadly, this here was a bit problematic for me. The soundtrack is mostly composed of short loops that are used in long scenes which could really quickly become annoying. They didn't loop too well either, almost always you could tell when the track ended and started replaying. It's a shame because otherwise there was some good cinematic sounding terror songs in there as well as some decent ambiance. I do feel that a lot of the soundtrack fit the game like a charm, if only they weren't such short loops, so I can still give praise to that.




So let's get on to something else I can praise - the story. It's simple, but it's there, and it gets the job done. There were a lot of stand out scenes accompanied by some great animations that made them instantly iconic and memorable. Once again, the writing for the town's inhabitants is very good. They feel rude and distant and also make you quickly realize something is very wrong with this town.

I had mixed feelings about the main cast, though. Sandra is a likeable character for the most part, but man is she awkward as hell. When she meets Alan, one of the two other main characters, their conversation made me cringe so hard that I did lose a bit of my sanity. To sum up the conversation, it goes a little like this.

''Hey there.''
''Hi.''
''I just saw a dog die.''
''Oh. Well I'm here for a science convention.''
''Okay.''

Speaking of Alan, he was a bit of a strange character. His personality does a near 360 at the end which was a bit off, but I guess it could be implying that he was concealing his feelings or something, so I'll give him a pass. Jake, on the other hand, is built up to be an asshole, and he's an asshole. That's pretty much it. This is the thing that really made me upset about the story of the game. It makes you suspect him the entire time, almost FORCES you to suspect him, and then it just basically... goes along with it. It makes itself very predictable. Now think of how brilliant of a twist it would be if you expected Jake to do something terrible the entire time but it turned out the real bad guy you should have suspected was Alan all along, and Jake ended up protecting you from him? Sadly, it's just a could've been now as I highly doubt this will change.

But going back to the positives, I gotta say, I really liked the town's backstory that you uncover near the end. It doesn't outright tell you everything, but still answers a lot. Now what I wasn't as fond of is how stupid things got sometimes. When Sandra tries to leave the town, she finds out the exits have been run over by... wait for it... giant scorpions. I feel like it would have worked so much better if she COULD leave the town, but no matter where she walked she would somehow end up back at Dusty Creek for whatever reason. Alternatively, they could have just made it so that Sandra walks a while in the sun, but eventually gives up and goes back once she realizes she won't be able to make it anywhere without a car.



The gameplay is just your basic adventure game stuff. You'll find an item, use it somewhere to proceed to get another item to get another item and so on. There's a few clever sequences here and there, such as a few where you have to use your surroundings to defeat a monster in the mines. I really like this, a lot of rpg horror games just have you running away from the monster while here you're forced to try and figure out a way to defeat it using whatever you can find.

It can be a bit annoying sometimes because there's a few times you'll have to walk in small rooms where it's pretty much impossible to manouver while still getting chased, and I found it impossible not to take damage at these bits. Luckily, the monsters aren't insta kill for the most part so it's not a huge problem, but you'll have to plan out your steps carefully so you can take some hits when you have to and then avoid getting hit again. Also, it was a tad frustrating that the monster would usually absolutely REFUSE to go where you wanted it to. There are multiple times when you have to get a monster to walk into something or stand on something but most of the time they would just walk straight around it. It wasn't too bad, it only took me a few tries to finally get them to go where I wanted, but still gimmicky none the less.

And my biggest problem with the game would definetly have to be those few spots where the lack of polish will become very apparent. The custom menu is really nice, but I found it very easy to bug the hell out of it. At times, the deaths can be quite unfair because you are given absolutely no warning. There are a lot of areas where you walk in one direction and then teleport to another facing another. For example, let's say you walk left on one map and touch the edge and it transfers you to another map. This map is facing ''upwards'' so you'll have to walk up instead of left, but when you enter a map, your first thought wouldn't be to stop walking, so naturally you'd walk left. And here's the problem, the teleport tiles teleport you right on other teleport tiles, so you'll accidentally walk into these and go back a lot. This happened to me nearly every time I switched from one map to another in Dusty Creek. I would go back and forth between each map at least once before I could finally go where I wanted to. I also found that there was a lack of saves at times, not to mention since the save is inside a building it was very easy to forget to save if you were focused on walking around town. I ended up losing a lot of progress due to this a few times. The dialogue was super slow too. The characters pause a lot and stuff, so this made playing through a cutscene you've already seen if you die painfully sucky.



Despite having its issues, I feel that desert nightmare still manages to be a good game. So, was it worth a 2 after all? No, I'd say increase that up to 3.5 penis rocks out of five.