Posted on: April 16, 2010
Thompsons
Verified ownerGames: 257 Reviews: 1
Why yes, I would like to spend six dollars and several hours in anger
You know, I have to credit Horrorsoft for making games with genuinely creepy ambiance and gore. Things got in your face and when you died, you saw just what that ghoul or hellhound did to your ugly mug when he slaughtered you. Every environment was spooky and deadly, and it really felt as if nowhere was safe for your hapless protagonist. That aside, I really have to say that their titles were also some of the absolute worst adventure games I've played in my whole life, and Personal Nightmare is no different. From obscure puzzles and solutions ("hit dog with stake"? How many people here would have even guessed that if it wasn't for that screenshot?) to screwy first-person perspective movement and a punishing difficulty, this game is just a crash-course in frustration. And the sheer number of dead-ends, Jesus-- Every Horrorsoft game gave Sierra a run for its money in terms of "screw you for playing our game," and Personal Nightmare set the trend. Literally, you can render the game unwinnable in two separate ways in the span of, like, one minute if you miss Jimmy getting run over and forget to take the key from the Robert's coat in the bar. Not to say anything of the game's control system, which is an awkward combination of both point-and-click and text parser. You can use your mouse to click on objects, open doors, move in a direction, and combine items with a "handy" list of verbs on the right side of the screen. Unfortunately, you can't actually beat the game using just the verb list, and you have to press enter to issue a command which basically defeats the purpose of even having a verb list in the first place. Instead, you mostly rely on the game's parser, which is nowhere near as intuitive as the parsers in games like Zork and Spellbreaker. You wanna get a key from a pocket? "You can't see the key." Okay then, OPEN POCKET. An inventory screen is opened up and I can see the key now, but... I can't pick it up from there. It turns out you need to use TAKE KEY FROM JACKET, but why can't I just use TAKE KEY? I know where it is, I can plainly see it in an inventory window. And this isn't the first time you get these awkward moments trying to wrangle something from a container. And the actual movement itself feels strange, as instead of arrow-based movement, the games uses both cardinal AND intermediate (NE, SE, etc) directions, as well as the occasional "go up/down" direction. There's no compass to keep track of which way you're facing so if you use the mouse click on the action window and move, you won't actually be told which way you're facing. It's frustrating because instead of the keyboard and mouse controls complementing each other nicely, either one just feels useless enough that you HAVE to use the other at different intervals. It's completely irritating and would have been better if they had just stuck solely with a parser OR a point-and-click interface instead of badly melding both. And of course, it wouldn't be a Horrorsoft title without an irritating gimmick. In Elvira 1-2 and Waxworks, it was the RPG-lite mechanic and spellcrafting. On the plus side, Personal Nightmare came before Horrorsoft started shoehorning combat into their games. Instead, they used something just as annoying: the entire game is on a time limit, with certain events only happening at certain times or only ever occurring once. If you miss an important event or time frame then the game is unwinnable and you're forced to start over. It does sort of add a sense of urgency and dread, but the timeframe is so constricting and it's difficult to tell just how exactly you messed up in any given segment, let alone how you're supposed to foresee any consequences of your (in)actions. To be fair, the game does have some not-horrible aspects. For one, the graphics are decent. Finely animated and a decent color range keep things from being harsh on the eyes. The story is also pretty unique: you're just the son of a local vicar, coming down from your life in the big city to spend some time with your family. But when you get there, you find things are very, very wrong, and it's up to you to kill the beasts of Satan while having the cops deal with the possessed townsfolk by giving them evidence to arrest the evildoers. It's actually a pretty unique setup, having the police be your buddies instead of a hindrance or enemy. Sadly, that's where the game's positive aspects end. There are much, much better games you could purchase for six bucks on this site. For the love of God, do NOT spend it on this, a monument to bad adventure game design.
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