Parry Nightmare is something of a bullet hell game, where instead of solely trying to dodge your main form of attack is parrying approaching enemies. You play as a soul, trapped in a lucid nightmare along with your demonic guardian Honnou, in which you must fight and reflect on major points of trauma and stress in your life.

I have a few points of contention with this game. I will start first by saying that aesthetically and atmospherically, it succeeds hard. Despite being short, it gives off a well polished and kind of eccentric vibe... when I first started playing, I thought it had a feeling like Paper Mario or Warioware though the gameplay didnt reflect that, of course.

The game is hard. It might be one of the most difficult games I have ever played. It is not like other bullet hells, where they slowly ease you into things, with your safety net of bombs or other clearing objects for when you get stuck. You stand in a circular room, enemies coming from all sides, your main point of interaction is hitting A when an enemy gets within a certain range of you to parry. Honnou will then shoot when they are down and you can collect a light fragment from them, 100 being needed to beat the level... though, one light drop from one enemy only seems to be .1 instead of a full figure, which isnt that big of a problem, but you also cant see at first and need to collect 70 of these light drops to have a full range of the room. You can not take many hits, and when youre down to your last health you become sluggish until you gain some more (which pretty much means youre going to die), your clearing bomb isnt on hand but instead its built up when you do well, so if you get hit once or parry early you can lose it and become overwhelmed. Bosses can also only be hit with this attack and take up a large portion of the arena. Even though traditional bullet hells are long, somehow dying in this feels worse. The levels are short, can be beaten in under 5 minutes, but somehow every time I died I felt like it wasnt my fault. Enemies move very, very fast and its incredibly easy to just have a boss sit its ass right down on you when youre sluggish and can barely move. It feels like I make one tiny mistake, parry early, my level goes down (as it does when you miss a parry), then Honnou isnt strong enough to fight off everyone and I get overwhelmed and die and now its dark again and uuuuugh. If there was one safety net (like a mid level checkpoint) I feel like it would be much more manageable, but as it is now it is insanely difficult.

Story-wise, I also had a sour taste in my mouth after finishing. Parry Nightmare takes place in Japan, and a lot of the protagonist girl's problems extend out of things that are found frequently there (high workload, shaky relationship with mother), though of course these issues could be found anywhere. The problem presents itself in how the ending treats these traumas. Throughout the game, the girl makes it clear that she is deeply miserable on a base level to the point where she barely recognizes she has things she enjoys. She has little time to herself, her entire life commandeered and seen through what other people expect of her, down to the makeup brand she uses. Her mother makes her deeply unhappy and scared her as a child, her apartment is messy and fraught witn objects reminding her of stress. It is clear that if she continues living the way she is living, ignoring the messages from her body and mind, that she will get deeply sick, live a completely unsatisfying life, and probably die early. That's what I thought the game was leading up to- a wakeup call, time to make a change. Instead, the ending? "Your soul can overcome anything! Just keep pushing through!" And then it cuts to a cutscene where the girl is doing her work efficiently and talking to her mom on the phone, happily. So, what is it then? Was the moral of the story that everyone has things that stress them out, that the best thing we can ever hope to do is "push through them" instead of confronting why it is exactly that we dislike our parents, yet can't seem to admit it, why it is that we force ourselves to work so hard. Is the best we can ever hope to do is "push through" all of it? Is that healthy? There is a major contradiction in the game's messaging here. Though it seems like you're fighting off these traumas at first, it appears all you're capable of doing is subduing them until the next time they wring their ugly neck out in whatever form they take next. It felt icky, watching this person go back to a job they hate and a mother that has hurt them. I cant stand that ideology of "just deal with it" that has ruined many bodies and minds all at once.

So, it was interesting. Parry Nightmare feels good, solid. It's mostly the attitude it takes on the matter of stress that sours my opinion of it in general, as well as the difficulty. If you like short, challenging games then perhaps I would reccomend checking it out, just don't go taking life lessons from it.