A Nightmare's Trip

[got_quiet]

Name: A Nightmare's Trip
Status: Complete
Site: https://skyhour.itch.io/a-nightmares-trip
Pairing: Gen
Description: A vacation through not-Japan where you meet a cast of very strange NPCs

This is a cute, meandering game that feels like it falls just short of being professional and polished. The story is a bit of an odd one. You're the manifestation of a nightmare going on a nice little vacation to Kumo City, which is described as a weird overlap of realities but is basically a fusion of Tokyo and Taipei. While there you do some tourist things, meet a collection of colorful characters, and finally run into the person who manifested you into the world through their nightmares. The very first scene of the game suggests that this might be some sort of horror, or involve a somewhat darker theme, as you terrorize some small kid as a nightmare, but the tone immediately shifts after that scene and the rest of the game is a cutsey, light romp full of shenanigans and politeness set in a psychedelic world that is full of strange creatures that come from other dimensions. It drops the nightmare theme quick. There are lines after involving some dreaming, but the bulk of the game has nothing to do with nightmares, other than the fact that you were born from one.

 

The writing is a little rough. I try to assume that certain choices are based on standards I'm not familiar with the best I can, but I was interrupted in my reading multiple times by grammar that wasn't quite right, or the use of terms that didn't make much sense. An early example of this was the phrase "immaculate amounts of grease" to imply large amounts of grease. This was particularly confusing because the sentence was referring to a mess and immaculate is... an antonym of messy. "Sometimes you can't stay headlong into every battle." I feel like this game is trolling me. At some point a character calls the small, fox-like protagonist a twunk?!?! I got the feeling that I was letting Gen Z humor fly past my head often while playing. There's also a lot of lapslock. Capitalization and punctuation is discarded regularly, I assume in the service of tone. I'm not a massive stickler about that, but I generally wish that games didn't lean too heavily into discord style writing.

The art was kind of hard for me to parse. Most of the companion characters were ok, but for the player character the color palettelacks contrast and there are no outlines so it all merges into something of a blob. Text fonts change depending on the character speaking a la Undertale, and some wonky fonts coupled with a semitransparent background made reading more difficult than it needed to be.


 

There were also a few coding issues. Overlapping sprites, sprites changing their clothes between poses, that sort of thing. The chapter titles are at the end of each chapter instead of the beginning. For example, there's a chapter at the top of Tokyo Tower. Then at the end of the scene you get a chapter card saying, "Top of the tower" or something to that effect. Scrollback is partially locked. You can scroll back to dialog but can't re-choose choices. It's not hard to just load a save further back and fast forward to the desired choice that way, so imposing that lock is just an unnecessary inconvenience that doesn't add anything to the game.

However, the game is linear so the choice locking isn't actually a big deal.. The script is actually not encrypted so I could dig around to see what was up, and it's a simple structure with minimal stats. Say nice things to the characters and you get friend points, which means they show up in later scenes. Be kinda mean and they disappear. There is also a "passive" and "aggro" stat which you end up setting at the beginning of the game when you decide how to behave towards your nightmare target. Once those stats are set it seems like you don't get any opportunities to alter them. Instead the game tells you how your feeling about something based on which stat is higher throughout the game. Even in situations later in the game where you are given an option about how to approach something like, whether to be aggressive at a game or more methodical about it, your stat doesn't change. In other words outcomes are soft locked within the first ten minutes of the game.

 

There are no diverging paths, and the little side scenes with each character are pretty short, as is the game overall. It took me about 2 hours to complete I think, though I got distracted at some point in between and my records aren't perfect. While A Nightmare's Trip has a few flaws, it's nowhere near the worst I've played, and makes for a conflictless, straightforward, feel-good game.