Recently, my routine has completely lost its way and I have almost lost touch with reality. Sometimes, in the abundance of deadlines and plans moving forward, it is very easy to lose sight of important guidelines and start working to your detriment. It was on one of these sleepless nights that for some reason I wanted to remember Neverending Nightmares. This year this quest will be 9 years old since its release, but it still continues to warm the hearts of its loyal fans. It would seem that there could be something interesting in slow walks along the corridors in search of the next script or screamer, but believe me - Thomas’s delusional hallucinations are much deeper and more interesting than it might seem at first glance.

Thomas has always been an exemplary boy and an obedient son. Living with his sister in a spacious mansion, he could not imagine that someday these serene everyday life would come to an end. The luxurious life pretty much spoiled the children, but at the same time forced them to look for their own entertainment, because their parents were always away from home. Endless rooms and bedrooms were littered with dolls and toys of all kinds, but this only caused boredom among the wealthy heirs of the family business. And then the children discovered something really interesting - they learned what death is. It all started with dead swifts, which were smashed in dozens against the windows of the second floor, then a dead deer joined the matter, whose ripped-up carcass was not eaten by the scavengers, and the final chord for the children was self-mutilation. They were amused by poking the glassy eyes with a stick, examining the insides and playing with the corpses like rag dolls. They especially liked to make small cuts on the body and watch warm blood ooze out. These “games with death” ended with Thomas’s sister being seriously injured and after that her brother swore that he would not allow this to happen again. From that moment on, Thomas completely lost his peace. He had terrible visions of his sister's death everywhere and he couldn't do anything about it. Sometimes falling into unconsciousness during the rare breaks between nightmares, Thomas experienced attacks of panic fear, and his sanity slowly faded away. After he finally lost touch with reality, our hero thought about something important - is he really who he is or is this also part of the nightmare?

Neverending Nightmares is a side-scrolling quest where we have to help Thomas figure out who he really is. The gameplay consists of measured walks through locations, looking for scripts. Sometimes we will come across opponents whom we will have to bypass or hide, because our hero will not be able to fight back. The game does not involve collecting items or solving puzzles, but instead we will enjoy a creepy atmosphere and various types of cruelty. Neverending Nightmares is not a linear story, so don't take its ending at face value. The plot of this game can be compared to the work of the impressionists, where everyone can see their patterns and hidden meanings. There are a total of 3 endings in the game, which you will have to open each time by completing the game from the very beginning.

The main highlight of Neverending Nightmares is its visual style. At first, the modest pencil drawing puts you in a complacent mood and you expect to see something thoughtful and philosophical on the screen, but instead they start poking your nose at various abominations. Here you won’t see the usual full-screen screamers or sharp sounds, but you can “enjoy” dismemberment and scenes with an abundance of bloody cruelty to your heart’s content. The atmosphere of the game is not scary, but sometimes it causes acute attacks of nausea and disgust, so I sincerely do not recommend that you play this while eating.

On the other hand, the meaning of Neverending Nightmares is much deeper than just nasty pictures. This game was created by people who really suffer from psychological illnesses and have suffered a lot in life. Essentially, this dark quest is a living adaptation of their inner pain, experiences and nightmares, which a random player is invited to plunge headlong into. The game consists entirely of a bunch of mental illnesses, many of which can be seen in various endings and even game locations. You can endlessly analyze the meaning of the endings, look for secret signs in the plot and analyze nightmare scenes frame by frame, but this will lead to absolutely nothing. Anyone who enters the territory of Neverending Nightmares will have to come to terms with the fact that nothing will help Thomas and all that remains is to simply take the horrors he saw for granted.

Neverending Nightmares desperately resists being understood. This game masterfully hides the true meaning behind masks and constantly replaces concepts so that the player never understands what is happening on the screen. A dream, a vision or a nightmare - it makes no difference where Thomas is, but it is much more important to determine for yourself who he really is. From the point of view of plot and gameplay, a rather ambiguous quest with a complete lack of action, but the visuals can surprise you with unexpected images and test the degree of your disgust. Although the game offers three playable endings, even a single journey through the world of Neverending Nightmares will plunge you headlong into Thomas' clouded mind, where a broken man's worst nightmares reside. This pleasant mixture of suspense and cruelty may well brighten up your evening, giving you new reasons for gloomy thoughts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXFDw2CFnA

I am pretty sure Neverending Nightmares is set in the late 1800s to give its edward gorey riff more authenticity, in the perfectly naïve way that indie games plumb this or that aesthetic in order to stand out, rather ignorant of what they’re standing in. still, the extravagant wealth portrayed in this facsimile of high living could have only been accumulated through slavery or colonialism (or of course, both). implicitly then, racism and class war drape the warped nursery that facilitates playing chicken with the protagonist’s misogynistic impulses, ones that he inevitably succumbs to in his imagination, again and again. notably, only ever in his imagination. he is fighting the ghosts of his unconscious drive, things that he inherited but does not ever quite completely understand.

if there is a coherent story, it’s only to create a non-productive, schizo-oedipal between sister/daughter/wife. it is very enjoyable to me how much the author does not understand freud, because the legacy of freud is much better mangled like this and made into worthless dead-ends. so it is interesting, then, how much the game delimits its own potential. its mechanics are ever-present, and demand some joke-like spectrum of mastery. but they do not develop really. and the game still resists being stripped down to its essential components, adding disjunctions and doodads that lead to non-linear, non-connecting zones. or more often, plain, gratuitous, horrible self-violence, as if it is the only possible response to what the protagonist has inherited. the idea of non-productive flows comes to my mind, in a way that naturally stymies and cuts off the post-Silent Hill 2 psychodrama in a way that’s a mixture of stoic deliberation and totally natural submission into a complete portrayal of impulses (also, budget constraints, lol).

and so much like this. there’s a dream sequence in The Book of Franza by ingeborg bachmann where a father points out to his daughter: “this is the cemetery of buried daughters,” and hearing this she sobs. this exchange, metaphor doubled, is charged with patriarchal violence, seeming to say, I will bury you there, or, haven’t I already? yet it’s also farcical, as the father and daughter yet live, and the implication hangs on without ever getting held on. if I’m able to step outside of jung for a moment, I can re-recognize this scene as shared grief. the position-in-relation, instead of the position-of-satisfaction. should we not mourn for the daughters? I think this counterfactual in vain, the specter of neurosis looms all around, and I don’t yet know how to forgive it.

I love many scenes in books and I don’t end up remembering them. I’ve held on to this one like a reality marble, a final projection, and I think it’s because it’s a physical place. a place you can look at and go to, one you can walk around in. this physical, dreamed up allegory of endings, is… well it’s a lot like a videogame, to me. it is, I guess, the evil version of the museum of dead wifery, one that’s to be taken at face value, instead of integrated into an ironic system. it provokes a stale romanticism, a domestic grief, a remove from the problems, as they’re used to garnish existing grief, that is converted into relation only by a selfish desire to embody the more difficult, accumulated forms of covalent suffering from this place of remove.

lots of games are like this, including Neverending Nightmares. I suppose if I had more integrity I would condemn it, if I believed art is our vehicle into a better world. cecile pineda wrote that writing can “…provide a moment of grace, both for her who writes and him who reads, in a very dark world.” her novel Face is almost a constructive case against degradation, as it refuses to be specifically one problem of degradation. and so like that book, it is a stupid, pithy fact that I relate to the honest depictions of intrusive violence in Neverending Nightmares. maybe not all of them at once, and maybe not as much anymore, but if I could discard every mistake and thoughtcrime I’ve made at once, I probably wouldn’t be writing about games anymore.

👾 Neverending Nightmares (🇺🇸 2014)

Under the peculiar art style, lies a dark and gruesome story. The gameplay is quite simple and repetitive but it genuinely made me feel anxious and scared thanks to a brilliant sound design.

🎮 Played on Steam Deck

Rating: 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️▫️

Played on Android

Horror games that are truly scary are far and few between these days. Neverending Nightmares night actually help change that idea with some extremely intense atmosphere which is what horror games are all about. Neverending Nightmares has you playing as a boy (or man?) named Thomas who roams the pencil sketched hallways in his checkered pajamas trying to find his sister (or wife?) that had been murdered (or she killed herself?) There’s a lot of open interpretation to the game’s story, but that’s kind of the fun part.

The game’s pace is at a crawl, let me just say that right away. Thomas trods along the hallways with a limited — and I mean limited — sprint button. The slow pace is supposed to add to the tension, but sometimes I wish he moved just a tad faster as the game got repetitive towards the end. The point of the game is to continue moving left (or right) through the hallways opening doors and interacting with anything that’s colored and stands out from the black and white background. These give hints at what may have happened to the girl that Thomas is looking for. While there’s no inventory system or even combat system, there’s really no other goal rather than head downwards. Sure, there are enemies in the game, but your goal is to avoid them or hide from them. The toughest of them all is the big ogre like monsters that require you to hide in closets, or worse, run from them. I found these segments frustrating as Thomas’ sprint is limited to about three seconds and I had to exploit this to escape from these ogres and make it to the next door. I had to tap rapidly to stretch out the sprint or time when I start perfectly. This isn’t fun and doesn’t add anything but frustration.

The game has three possible ending, but there are no clues as to how to get them. At the end of each level you are approached by this girl in different ways, but it all kind of blurs together. When you die you start off in your bed again leading the fact that Thomas might be asleep and can’t wake up? Is he insane? Is he a ghost? Who knows, but the endless hallways are probably the worst part of the game. Sometimes I thought the game was glitching because I would go through 5-6 hallways that I swore I went through earlier, but somehow I was progressing.

Thankfully the game is actually scary, use headphones and you will be in for a scary night. The music is haunting and so are the sound effects. I applaud the game for the atmosphere, but the gameplay is really something that’s lacking and needs more polish. I’m fine with just wandering around places, but give me something to do while I’m doing that.

As it stands, Neverending Nightmares is a great horror experience, but as an actual gam, it’s lacking mechanics and the story and progression need work. I shouldn’t be playing a game thinking I’m not going anywhere or given clues as to how to get a different ending.

Neverending Nightmares is one of the only horror games I've played so far that has made me genuinely feel uneasy while playing.

This game is obviously not for everyone. I think that should be said outright. If you are looking for jump scares, a narrative that is easy to follow, a game that takes hours to complete, or monsters you can fight, this game is not for you. To top it all off, this game is an unapologetic walking simulator. If my point hasn't made it clear already, this game is not for everyone.

However, if you manage to stick around through or if you're just curious enough to try out the game, you will find a game that, in my opinion, is a fun and scary indie title. The art style is incredible, the music was great, the hide and seek system with the monsters feels good to play against, and the cut scenes in this game were absolutely unforgiving in what they depicted.

I enjoyed this game for what it had to offer. It's a concept that I think should be explored more in other horror games as it really made me feel like I was trapped in a never ending nightmare.