Mary Skelter: Nightmares

Mary Skelter: Nightmares put out on PSV is a classic dungeon crawler with a turn-based combat system. The action takes place in a world where humanity is locked up in a gigantic prison guarded by dangerous creatures. The game is a collaboration between Japanese company Idea Factory and Compile Heart – a studio specialised in publishing low-budget, niche RPG titles for PlayStation and PC. Mary Skelter: Nightmares is similar to other dungeon crawlers with visuals that draw on games inspired by manga and anime titles, namely Demon Gaze, Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & The Monster Seal, Stranger of Sword City, and MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death.

Plot

Mary Skelter: Nightmares takes us to a fantasy world where humanity suffers tortures in a humongous prison surrounded by walls high for hundreds of metres and having an extremely tall watchtower in the middle. The creatures that torture and guard humans are called Nightmares. There is a group of people, however, who managed to free themselves from the power of the demons, and built their own city guarded by a mysterious organisation founded especially for this purpose. Jack - the main hero - and his friend are set free by them. Simultaneously, they are surprised to find out that both of them are granted supernatural powers. Interestingly, new allies from the organisation have names of characters from different classic tales. The two heroes and the new friends set out on a journey in order to find a way out and to learn how to crush the guards.

Mechanics

The gameplay model is very similar to that in other dungeon crawlers developed by Compile Heart. Combat is turn-based, the action is seen from the first-person perspective, dungeons you move around are tiled, and cutscenes are executed in a visual-novel style. Jack stays out of the battlefield and only supports five fighting heroes with his superpowers. Each character can belong to more than one character class and have unique special abilities and attacks. The heroines have a “blood” gauge and when it is full, they go into a berserker mode and become deadly effective.

Technical aspects

In Mary Skelter: Nightmares for PSV, undergrounds and models of enemies feature simple, 3D visuals. Gameplay is accompanied by electro-string music.

Last updated on 29 June 2018