Reviews
[Review] Nightmare Reaper is a Retrotastic FPS War on Dreams
Blazing Bit Games manages to stuff an awful lot into Nightmare Reaper. On the surface, it appears to be the latest in a growing procession of retro-inspired first-person shooters. Instead, it’s a delightfully bizarre fusion of that, a rogue-lite, mini-games, and looter shooter that goes to some interesting, if sometimes incoherent, places. After several years of development and Early Access, it’s ready to face its demons and the general public.
Players are put in the gown of a psychiatric hospital patient who suffers hellish nightmares. She has a unique way of handling them though, as they generate first-person shooter levels with enemies she can slay with all manner of weaponry. Every time she falls in her dreams, new ones are created, offering up different locales, enemies, and weapons each time. There’s a story behind the patient and her incarceration to unravel in between, but the meat and potatoes of Nightmare Reaper are in the blasting of demons, undead, unearthly beasts, and much more.
Each level is standard fare to begin with. Through corridors of various shades and textures, you fire away at whatever flavor of foe the game has deigned to throw your way. You collect the treats and treasures those enemies drop to help you upgrade your skills down the line, and you uncover secret loot within the levels. The procedurally-generated nature of the game means there’s no true pattern to get used to in any given level, so there’s a freshness to each run, but tempered by a little frustration when the roll of the virtual dice goes against you.
You need to find weapons in each level, and can only keep one of three at the end of them, with the other two at least giving you a small cash settlement as compensation. While there are the usual flavors of weaponry such as shotguns, knives, explosives, and the like, they come in a variety of tiers, so it makes exploration a worthwhile cause with the hope of finding a juicy Legendary weapon to carry through into the next nightmare gauntlet.
And searching for new weapons is especially great because the combat is pretty damn good. The visual feedback of the damage you do is very satisfying, and the sheer oomph of the better weapons can very much be felt as you funnel more and more into their power. The game boasts 80-odd weapon types with around 30 different enchantments, and any mix of these can show up during the first-person play. The biggest issue I had was deciding which fun gun to keep at the end of a stage.
Part of the fun comes from not knowing what combination of throwback shooter locales and enemies you’re going to blast through next. Nightmare Reaper is, for me at least, like a celebratory parade of my late 90s PC gaming favorites, and within the context of nightmares, the constant shift of levels that draw inspiration from the likes of Duke Nukem 3D, Powerslave, Quake, and Hexen remains surprisingly cohesive. At times it feels like floppy disks of every 90s shooter ever got melted down together and the fumes from the collective hulk of burning plastic and metal birthed this vivid hallucination. I mean that in the nicest way. As part of its dedication to throwback shooters, Nightmare Reaper is also delightfully gore-soaked, making the combat just that bit more pleasing.
The other parts of the rogue-lite aspect to Nightmare Reaper are more of a mixed bag to me, unfortunately. I really like the concept of turning skill trees into playable retro minigames (which are played in-game on retro consoles), and it certainly offers up a bit of a break from the endless shooting and looting, but they don’t always end up being enjoyable to go through, and sometimes actively get in the way of a good time by wasting your time for a pithy reward. I applaud the sentiment, but wish it had been reined in a little bit.
Also, while I generally enjoyed the chop n’ change levels, some things didn’t mesh all that well and occasionally hindered the act of shooting with fudgy visual mashes. A rare problem, but I suppose it could just as easily be a lesser or greater problem for someone else given it’s procedurally-generated.
Nightmare Reaper is a highly enjoyable mash of retro things with a deliciously barbed edge. It doesn’t always hit the high notes of the old favorites it belts out, but you’ll sing along just the same.
Nightmare Reaper review code provided by the publisher.
Nightmare Reaper is out now on Steam.
Reviews
‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Returns With a Hypnotic, Inscrutable Neon Fever Dream
Nicolas Winding Refn considers his first feature film in ten years, Her Private Hell, a resurrection. At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the filmmaker revealed that his return was inspired, in large part, by his own mortality. His need to create art kicked into overdrive after beating death in 2023, when his heart stopped for 25 minutes.
Her Private Hell is pure art, too, bearing the filmmaker’s neon and synth signatures, as well as a deep disinterest in scrutable storytelling. Much like The Neon Demon, Refn’s latest demands you bend to its wavelength: an expressionistic vision more interested in the artistic process than the narrative.
That’s not to say that Her Private Hell lacks plot; this sci-fi horror noir features two central overlapping plots. At the forefront is actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who lives in the penthouse suite overlooking a hazy neon metropolis with her father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), and young stepmom Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), who happens to be Elle’s former best friend before marriage got in the way.
To say that Elle has daddy issues would be an understatement, made worse by insecurities, the arrival of a new acting ingenue (Kristine Froseth), and a vicious killer prowling the city: the Leather Man.
The secondary plot follows the enigmatic Private K (Charles Melton), an American soldier in Japan with resolute vengeance on his mind. Whereas Elle’s world exists in a space of glamour and opulence, Private K pummels his way bare-knuckled through the sweaty backstreets ruled by local crime syndicates down below.
Refn, who co-writes with Esti Giordani, manages to corral a variety of seemingly disparate genres and influences into a clinically cold and cryptic whole. The filmmaker infuses his signature style with everything from ’60s sci-fi to Golden Age Hollywood melodrama to Japanese folklore, hung on the framework of a Dario Argento-style Giallo. There’s a prominent psychosexual edge to both Elle and Private K’s separate journeys, one that dials up to zany excess when it comes to the former character.
There’s an overarching sense of mystic mythmaking to Her Private Hell, with elusive seamstresses, played by Shioli Kutsuna and Aoi Yamada, dipping in and out like folkloric, omnipotent kitsune as they seemingly preside over the increasing chaos that entails brutal knife fights, Freudian melodrama, and a supernatural killer that brutally rips his victims apart. All of it told with Refn’s detached, sterile style.
It’s less a conventional movie and more a stream of consciousness, a collection of inspirations and personal thoughts and themes. Nothing is really explained in this nonsensical fairy tale fever dream. Thatcher gives herself fully to the spoiled Elle, whose affluent privilege makes her a bundle of raw, primal emotions that erodes her sense of identity and reality. It makes her the tonal and visual opposite of the elusive Private K., and much credit goes to Refn, Melton, and Thatcher for wringing compelling performances out of such nebulous, vague characters.
As with most of Refn’s work, you’re either on his frequency or not. Her Private Hell is wholly uninterested in explanation or convention. It’s also heavily disjointed and unhurried in its eclectic, sparse amalgamation of genre inspirations. Still, it’s tough not to fall sway to the magnetic allure of its exquisite, pulse-pounding sights and sounds, complete with an incredible score by legendary composer Pino Donaggio.
While it never fully pulls you into its tangled web of artistic musings, there’s a lot to admire in a technically stunning feature this fearless in its incomprehensibility and ambition.
Her Private Hell releases in theaters on July 24.
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