Through the Nightmares (Demo)
A downloadable game
⚠️ Screenshots show not only locations, presented in the demo. If you like the game - wishlist the game on steam in order to not miss the release.
Through the Nightmares - is the most atmospheric hardcore action-platform game you have ever seen!
Imagine a hardcore platformer. High quality, unique gameplay, and nice responsive control. And then turn it upside down! Instead of simple pixel art which is usual for this genre, imagine deep narrative with beautiful environments taking place in the scary and magical world of a childhood nightmare.
You'll get: Through the Nightmares.
The game narrates about the Sandman wandering the world of children's nightmares. The goal of the main character is to find and rescue the child from a trap the almighty Morpheus.
The game consists of three chapters, each chapter tells the story of an individual child. All dreams are different, as well as children aren't similar to each other: everyone has his own hobbies, impressions, and fears.
You're about to stay overnight in the gloomy forest, to explore depths of space and to visit an epoch of knights. However, you will can't enjoy the moment, because everything around will try to kill you.
Immerse yourself in the magical world of childhood nightmares. Help the Sandman to save the children, claiming all their fears. In the Through the Nightmares you will find:
- Comfortable and responsive control;
- Unique abilities for hardcore platformers, including reduction in size and possibility to set checkpoint anywhere;
- About 50 unique levels!
- A lot of action!
- More action!
- More than a hundred different mechanics, designed in the spirit of nightmares;
- Most of the mechanics work in the tempo of music; to predict timings, you just need to listen to the beat!
- No pixel art - only beautiful atmospheric locations, painstakingly assembled by hand
- About five hours of testing your reaction and nerves!
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Comments
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Alright, where to start... first of all, the menu is not great. It's not in line with the game, and the game is beautiful, so you should try to match that with the main menu since it's the first thing a player sees (for example, make hand drawn big buttons instead of plain text, and lose the low quality screenshot on the side). The models are beautiful, the colors amazing and the animations on point, except for when you land: sometimes the character slams on the ground or rolls after relatively small jumps, and that just feels weird. Also, the Z button to shrink is just not reachable to use while moving, I'd use N or M, so you could shrink with your right hand. The music is really well done, and the doors are a cool style of level selection, but I'd skip the level choice and just start the game when you open a door, you could maybe add a door to replay certain levels, but making it start directly where you left off would be way more immersive and continuous. Definitely waiting for updates :)
Wow, thank you for so big review!
About the menu, we will try to update it. I think about changing low-quality screenshot to high-quality with small animation, that will show your progress in the game - there are will be screenshots from the current last opened location. What do you think?
About animation - got it, I will double-check conditions.
About controlling, do you play with wasd? I will remove this option, and leave arrows only. We checked a lot of platformers and almost all of it use arrows instead of wasd: LIMBO, The End Is Nigh, Broforce, Hollow Knight, Super Meat Boy, and etc.
About skipping the selection of the level, I'm not sure. I want to make the user see the room every time he starts the game because the room has a big meaning. It becomes more alive when you will collect a child's objects in levels. You will see your progress there and it will force you to replay levels, where you didn't found the room object, or don't bring the flask on the finish.
Thank you very much for your feedback! We will do our best to not disappoint you on release! =D
ohhh i see. For the menu, that's a great idea but the buttons are the main thing that needs a restyling IMO (for example, if you look at the demo on my profile you can see how I set up my buttons to fit the style of the game), and for the controls, you might not want to get rid of wasd altogether, but maybe you could move the shrink button to something like left shift? So the game would be playable by right and left handed people easily :)
Pixel art font? Got it. Unfortunately, all low poly fonts I found look badly.
About control - I'm left handed and I'm ok with arrows 😀