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.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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