Parry Nightmare review

Goodbye Trauma-san, Good Morning to You!

Much like the Phoenixx-published NeverAwake, Parry Nightmare’s action also takes places in a world of surrealistic dreams. When Honno, the game’s protagonist falls asleep, her nighttime hours are teeming with trauma. Here, unresolved issues run wild, as anxieties about childhood, school, work, and even familial distress run wild.

Across a quartet of stages, your soul and psyche team up to try to eradicate this barrage of stressors and make it to the morning. But unlike most Vampire Survivors-style games, you can’t defeat the persistent swarm of enemies directly.

Honno-chan to the Rescue!

As the title implies, your soul can parry, which can eliminate projectiles and temporarily stun enemies. However, when foes are dazed, your devil-horned doppelganger named Honno-chan can destroy them. And when she does, adversaries leave behind globules of gatherable light. Unsurprisingly, success hinges on the collection of these.

Amass enough to fill a meter on the left side of the screen and you’ll make it through the night without your nightmares getting the best of you. And while that’s a feasible task at first, soon the playfield becomes littered with opposition. Beyond adversaries that will steal some of your health when they touch you, there are also larger opponents that will try to knock down Honno-chan. If they’re successful, you’ll have to hover nearby to revive her.

Well-Timed Outbursts

But you won’t get the usual drip feed or new weapons or statistical improvements to select from. Instead, a chain of successful parries provides assists like a larger stun radius for your character. Combos also fill up your Tension meter. When this gauge fills, you can initiate a Burst Attack that can clear out an entire region of enemies, leaving behind a multitude of light. Occasionally, defeating elevated enemies drops power-ups than can grab all adjacent light or increase Honno-chan’s offensive power. Nabbing these are essential for the game’s timed boss battles. It’s difficult to not appreciate the message of sushi helping you get through life’s hardships.

In between stages, you can learn more about the protagonist by exploring her apartment. These segments are presented via a point-and-click interface, offering a line or two of exposition when you scrutinize objects. But the storytelling is ambiguous, providing only generic details about the lead character’s life.

Curiously, the game’s spritework does a much better job at revealing her stressors, as you’re besieged by everything from bullying classmates to jammed photocopiers. Even the borders of each nightmare are menacing, as stretched arms with sharpened pencils or shouting superiors make each stage resemble some kind of suburban gladiatorial arena. Osamu Kubota’s (beatmania CORE REMIX, pop’n music 5) jazzy soundtrack prohibits Parry Nightmare from being too gloomy. Expectedly, it offers a pleasing groove at first before the intensity increases as the number of adversaries grow exponentially.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, Parry Nightmare is tough, with the end stage requiring precise timing as a flurry of foes surround your hapless soul. But the increase in difficulty for the game’s concluding stage is disproportionally hard-hitting, potentially creating some frustration. Given the game’s constrained number of stages, this could be disheartening. Ideally, Nightmare would have offered a longer and more gradual escalation of intensity spread out across a few more levels. But in the grand scheme of things, this hindrance isn’t worth losing any sleep over.

Parry Nightmare was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.