Nightmare of Decay: boomer survival horror FPS

[toughasnails]

This is quite the surprise, right now its user reviews are 97% positive with some 700 reviews, with p much no prior coverage of the game.
It's p much a full fledged survival horror with gameplay and looks of the ones from PSX era, but played from first person. Slow combat (with RE style criticals), resource management, puzzles, exploration, all of it set within a single mansion that slowly opens up as the game progresses. Great atmosphere, lots of surprises. it should take between 2.5 and 4 hours for a single playthrough plus there are additional mods unlocked after finishing the game. i'd say that it's absolute steal for the price.

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

And it's ruined with shitty retro style graphics. A game doesn't have to look like asshole to capture the oldschool feel. Such a retarded trend.

 

[Utgard-Loki]

videogames are a visual medium, which means you don't need to have narration for things which you are seeing with your goddamn eyeballs. "you see a guy waving around a severed head" no shit.

 

[Curratum]

Was on the fence for this one, tried half an hour of the demo, plays and feels better than I expected, just wish regular zombies wouldn't take 5 bullets to the head to drop sometimes.

 

[Curratum]

Just finished the demo minutes after I posted. The game is definitely nice, nothing to write home about, very standard fare for what it's doing, but it's doing nothing wrong.

I just wish it cost 2x and also had 2x the gameplay time, because the main story taking an average of 3 hours just makes me want to not spend money on it, even though it costs as much as a meal in a restaurant.

I already played 40 minutes in the demo, so that's just over 2 more hours of gameplay left in the main thing. I don't exactly care for the extra grindy modes to unlock stuff.

Just wish the dev added more content and upped the price proportionally, would have gladly paid 10-15 EUR if it was like a ~10 hour game.

Edit: Fuck it, bought anyway. Better to support this kind of game than not at all.

 

[toughasnails]

just wish regular zombies wouldn't take 5 bullets to the head to drop sometimes.

There is a very small chance for critical hits with the handgun, a la RE, which can blow their head with a single bullet. It's relatively rare though and there seems to be no way to increase it. Not even the shotgun or the magnum have 100% critical chance btw, just a p high one, sometimes even a point blank headshot from the shotgun wasn't enough to put a regular zombie down.

btw, Dusk's David Szymanski gave the game his seal of approval
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198000564041/recommended/1848450/

Nightmare of Decay is basically exactly what you want it to be: first person indie Resident Evil, with nods to all sorts of other media including Half-life, Dark Souls, and even Monty Python. It has a good understanding of what makes classic RE fun, and does a good job designing simple but fun puzzles that keep you looping around the levels, choosing which enemies to kill and which enemies to dodge around and what routes you want to use for backtracking. It's a little clunky to move and shoot but... I mean, it's a classic survival horror game. That's how it's gotta be. Otherwise it's surprisingly polished and well-designed, and a fun trip from beginning to end, if you enjoy classic survival horror and all the quirks that come with it.

The campaign takes about two hours to complete, and once it's over you unlock several other modes, including a randomizer, a procgen dungeon crawler that is a lot more fun than I expected and features enemies and bosses I didn't see in the main game, and a good old endless survival mode. In terms of both quality and content, I'd say it's well worth the $5 asking price. If you're a survival horror fan and you want a fun charming love letter to RE and all sorts of other stuff, definitely pick up Nightmare of Decay. It's a surprise hidden gem.

 

[Curratum]

David Szymanski is a soy-faced cuck of the highest order. I have stopped looking at or considering his opinions or the opinions of his clique of NB flunkies a long time ago.

It's a small miracle someone this milquetoast managed to produce Dusk, which is an above-average retro shooter, credit where it's due.

 

[Comte_II]

I played this game 30 years ago its called Doom

 

[agentorange]

I tried the demo and was pleasantly surprised despite it being very ugly, so I pirated the full game, and it goes downhill almost immediately after where the demo ends. The demo section in the early mansion is a very decent first person take on the classic RE structure, albeit far, far smaller and stripped down (almost like something I would expect to see on a free browser game a decade ago), but after a certain point the game decides to ape more off of Resident Evil 4 and begins throwing enemies with guns at you--at which point the game becomes simply a very bad FPS. The level design also becomes increasingly linear, as you go from the mansion which had the RE1/2 style structure of areas looping back on each other, to nothing but corridors funneling you into the next corridor.

tldr its mostly crap and its a testament to how bad things are in regards to survival horror that this game is being talked up as something great. theres also nothing "boomer" about it and no idea why its lumped in apparently with the homosexual "boomer shooter" group

edit: now that I think about it this game is quite similar to Spirits of Xanadu, in that both of them are like a microscopic, minimal recreation of a classic game (System Shock 2 in the case of SPirits of Xanadu) done by a very small indie team, but Spirits of Xanadu is far more successful so I recommend playing that instead.

 

[toughasnails]

That isn't exactly correct. There ARE enemies with guns, yes, but they are exceedingly rare, and whenever you do encounter them you have enough cover to get close to them and headshot them with the shotgun.

 

[Drop Duck]

videogames are a visual medium, which means you don't need to have narration for things which you are seeing with your goddamn eyeballs. "you see a guy waving around a severed head" no shit.

SumDrunkGuy has a point about graphics looking like someone's ugly ass. When the text described seeing a reflection in the TV I was reminded that Duke Nukem 3D had functioning mirrors back in January 1996. Don't we have the technology to show the reflection in the TV in 2022? What happened to show don't tell?

It's a small miracle someone this milquetoast managed to produce Dusk, which is an above-average retro shooter, credit where it's due.

But Dusk is awful and one of the worst retro shooters.

 

[agentorange]

That isn't exactly correct. There ARE enemies with guns, yes, but they are exceedingly rare, and whenever you do encounter them you have enough cover to get close to them and headshot them with the shotgun.

sure, it still sucks though. its a case where the game does absolutely nothing better than the game it is so clearly copying, and it offers less, and it is more ugly. once the initial allure of "oh this is a pretty good copy of the RE1 formula" wears off you are left with nothing. it could distinguish itself by having a very different setting than RE or something, but it doesn't, and the story is clearly different but goes nowhere and the ending is "it was all a dream" tier. there's so little going on with the game that there is very little to even talk about.

 

[Curratum]

videogames are a visual medium, which means you don't need to have narration for things which you are seeing with your goddamn eyeballs. "you see a guy waving around a severed head" no shit.

SumDrunkGuy has a point about graphics looking like someone's ugly ass. When the text described seeing a reflection in the TV I was reminded that Duke Nukem 3D had functioning mirrors back in January 1996. Don't we have the technology to show the reflection in the TV in 2022? What happened to show don't tell?

It's a small miracle someone this milquetoast managed to produce Dusk, which is an above-average retro shooter, credit where it's due.

But Dusk is awful and one of the worst retro shooters.

You must have skipped an awful lot of them to think Dusk is one of the worst.

 

[oldbonebrown]

Nice horror house action shooter ride. Just finished the last boss, real health pot and magdump fest.
Had a good time gliding through the spooky corridors of Nightmare of Deray, popping zombie skulls.
It was fun learning the quickest way to dispose of enemies and get through certain rooms. It's nothing brilliant, but it's a fast paced little Resident Evil-like puzzle that it feels good to get good at.
Very sparse budget feel, that makes a lot of direct references to other games. 3 hours of zombie corridor shooting, nice to put some music over while playing

I like the meta joke of the guy playing the actual game on his PC, in his grubby room - Just Like Me, what a nightmare!