Nightmare Reaper Review: Do Fear the Reaper (Switch)

An intact mind might be the most powerful thing in the world. It lets us create art, understand the finer things in life, and comprehend the universe's secrets. Our minds separate us from the wild beasts and make us humans. But what if, as has been asked before, and will be asked countless times from now until the end of time, a person's mind breaks? You get weirdoes, visionaries, people with scat fetishes, and in the case of Nightmare Reaper, serial killers.

Nightmare Reaper is an adventure through the horrific dreams of an even more horrific woman. Battle through terrifying demons with the biggest arsenal ever seen in a retro-style FPS, and uncover the mystery of what could cause someone to become such a vile, heartless monster.

Nightmare Reaper is available now on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam for $29.99.

A poet once said; "The only way you can truly defeat a demon is by taking a look at its entire life and understanding fully why it is the way it is", and that's precisely the point of Nightmare Reaper. Our protagonist, who shall be referred to as The Reaper for lack of a canonical name, lives in an insane asylum. The Reaper lives only to kill, and as she battles the monsters in her dreams, more about her past will be revealed. And more questions come up as the player progresses, like the question of whether all the hallucinations she sees are just that or if this asylum has more to it than meets the eye. This is an amazing setup for a story, but it is ruined by a desire to be non-intrusive.

The game's story is entirely optional, literally pushed off to the side on the protagonist's desk. I can't help but feel if this game was trying to adhere to the John Carmack philosophy of gaming narrative, that narrative is expected to be there but is ultimately irrelevant. I think the nuggets of story we get are fascinating, and wished the game made its lore far more integral than it currently is.

You may not have a deep story, but you do have a chainsaw at the very least.

The game's story uses audio logs but in the worst way possible. Take Bioshock for example. One could fully comprehend the game's story without listening to the audio logs, but the player is naturally incentivized to find them. They’re tragic, they’re funny at times, and they give more insight into how Rapture descended into chaos. Most games that have audio logs use them in a similar manner, providing insight into the world's past. In this context, they work. Audio logs are a great tool to supplement a game's story. This is where Nightmare Reaper screws up.

Audio Logs are the sole means by which Nightmare Reaper's story is conveyed. They’re logs of the doctor managing the Reaper's case, and while they’re interesting, they’re very poorly structured. Every completed stage rewards you with a new audio log, and they didn't have enough content for them. Most of these audio logs consist of a single sentence. This drip-feeding of the story does not serve the game's narrative at all. I think the story would be infinitely superior if they just bundled these audio logs together in batches of nine, threw some pixel art comic panels together, and gave them as a reward for beating each boss. It would be much better paced in that manner. Nightmare Reaper's story is interesting, but the manner in which it's told is awful.

Not enough games tell the story of how monsters came to be the way they are.

The story being underdeveloped is acceptable because the gameplay is as fully featured as can be. The Reaper's dreams put her in a retro-style FPS game, where she must destroy everything that moves. It's classic FPS action. Get guns, find keys, and blow all the monsters to bits. The action moves at a blistering pace, and it only gets faster with the dash and grappling hook that The Reaper gets later in the game. It has that wonderful "just one more level" vibe. Entire hours go by as you travel the dream world and leave a mountain of corpses behind you. With 90+ stages and multiple side modes, it will keep you coming back for more.

An FPS lives or dies by its arsenal, and Nightmare Reaper absolutely delivers on this front, with 80+ weapons and a Diablo-style loot system where all of those weapons can have various stat modifiers attached to them. There are your usual conventional rifles and pistols, various energy weapons, and many more esoteric weapons, like a variety of magic staves and spellbooks, and a number of weapons that are just totally badass, like a quad barrel shotgun. You never know when you’re going to find that next mega-weapon that’ll let you demolish everything.

Powerful weapons like the Scrap Cannon can turn your foes into chunky salsa.

The game is technically a roguelike, just enough for the game to be able to call itself one on the store page. You visit the same levels in the same order, but the level layouts are semi-randomly generated. I never really had an issue with this, and room layouts repeat very infrequently. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if the layout didn't change every time you die. The game still includes secret rooms, which I don't think works as well in a game of this style. In a retro FPS with handmade levels, the designer is able to more organically hint at secret areas, and the player can logically intuit where they are if the right clues are given. Here, it's just "punch the cracked walls". This is especially bad in all the cave levels that infest the early game, where the cracked walls blend into the level tileset.

Finding those secrets is very important though, as you need all that money for the meta-progression. To further your conquest of the dream world, you have to buy upgrades that’ll increase your max health and ammo capacity or unlock new abilities like a dash move. This is fairly conventional, but the method by which you unlock these abilities is far from normal. The main menu is hosted in a Game Boy Advance SP that The Reaper owns, and the ability storefronts take the form of game cartridges that are fully functional minigames. The minigames are completely optional if that's not your thing, but I think it helps contribute towards Nightmare Reaper's weird style.

The Reaper enjoys a brief respite from the madness of her dreams.

Optimization is the only other thing I find questionable here. There are very long loading times, and the game is very inefficient in managing them. You have to go back to the asylum after each stage, and it has to load it each and every time. It's particularly bad with the arena battles because if you fail, you have to endure three twenty-second loading screens before you can try again. Outside of that, there are occasional framerate hitches. One of the weapons I got was a pump-action shotgun with explosive rounds, and it felt like the game hitched half of the times I fired it. The game tends to stutter briefly when it comes to explosions in general.

Nightmare Reaper's gameplay isn't the only thing straight from the 90s, because the visuals fit right in there as well. Dark and gloomy aesthetic, lo-fi visuals, and monsters as pre-rendered sprites instead of 3D models. I really like the game's visuals, but the game could do with some more variety. Early on, the stages mostly consist of gray caves and forests that all blend together. It's just the same one or two tiles copied and pasted non-stop. Things get better once you move to the city later on, as there's considerably more variety there.

The Reaper takes Manhattan. Or Chicago. Since the dev is in Canada, this is probably Montreal. I wouldn't know, I’ve never been.

I also wouldn't have been opposed if the game went a little more abstract. While there are demons and robots and laser guns, it's still somewhat "normal" for the standards of retro FPS games. They could lean more into the dream aspect and have more abstract locales and creatures. Why not clowns for instance? They fit the bad dream aesthetic, and there aren't enough FPS games where you get to gun down monster clowns.

All of this is only bolstered by a heavy metal OST courtesy of Andrew Hulshult. With Dusk, Amid Evil, and Doom Eternal's DLC soundtracks under his belt, he was a perfect fit. His music is just nonstop energetic action, and I love every second of it. The rest of the game's sound design is great too, with lots of meaty gunshot and explosion sounds.

Nightmare Reaper was reviewed on Nintendo Switch, using a key provided by Feardemic.

An aspiring writer with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, what interests Devon most is the history of gaming. Whether from Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, or even Sega, Atari, and NEC, he's always willing to learn more about the rich tapestry of gaming. He's interested in nearly any genre, and always reviews things with a critical eye towards gaming's past.

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