Recently, my routine has completely lost its way and I have almost lost touch with reality. Sometimes, in the abundance of deadlines and plans moving forward, it is very easy to lose sight of important guidelines and start working to your detriment. It was on one of these sleepless nights that for some reason I wanted to remember Neverending Nightmares. This year this quest will be 9 years old since its release, but it still continues to warm the hearts of its loyal fans. It would seem that there could be something interesting in slow walks along the corridors in search of the next script or screamer, but believe me - Thomas’s delusional hallucinations are much deeper and more interesting than it might seem at first glance.

Thomas has always been an exemplary boy and an obedient son. Living with his sister in a spacious mansion, he could not imagine that someday these serene everyday life would come to an end. The luxurious life pretty much spoiled the children, but at the same time forced them to look for their own entertainment, because their parents were always away from home. Endless rooms and bedrooms were littered with dolls and toys of all kinds, but this only caused boredom among the wealthy heirs of the family business. And then the children discovered something really interesting - they learned what death is. It all started with dead swifts, which were smashed in dozens against the windows of the second floor, then a dead deer joined the matter, whose ripped-up carcass was not eaten by the scavengers, and the final chord for the children was self-mutilation. They were amused by poking the glassy eyes with a stick, examining the insides and playing with the corpses like rag dolls. They especially liked to make small cuts on the body and watch warm blood ooze out. These “games with death” ended with Thomas’s sister being seriously injured and after that her brother swore that he would not allow this to happen again. From that moment on, Thomas completely lost his peace. He had terrible visions of his sister's death everywhere and he couldn't do anything about it. Sometimes falling into unconsciousness during the rare breaks between nightmares, Thomas experienced attacks of panic fear, and his sanity slowly faded away. After he finally lost touch with reality, our hero thought about something important - is he really who he is or is this also part of the nightmare?

Neverending Nightmares is a side-scrolling quest where we have to help Thomas figure out who he really is. The gameplay consists of measured walks through locations, looking for scripts. Sometimes we will come across opponents whom we will have to bypass or hide, because our hero will not be able to fight back. The game does not involve collecting items or solving puzzles, but instead we will enjoy a creepy atmosphere and various types of cruelty. Neverending Nightmares is not a linear story, so don't take its ending at face value. The plot of this game can be compared to the work of the impressionists, where everyone can see their patterns and hidden meanings. There are a total of 3 endings in the game, which you will have to open each time by completing the game from the very beginning.

The main highlight of Neverending Nightmares is its visual style. At first, the modest pencil drawing puts you in a complacent mood and you expect to see something thoughtful and philosophical on the screen, but instead they start poking your nose at various abominations. Here you won’t see the usual full-screen screamers or sharp sounds, but you can “enjoy” dismemberment and scenes with an abundance of bloody cruelty to your heart’s content. The atmosphere of the game is not scary, but sometimes it causes acute attacks of nausea and disgust, so I sincerely do not recommend that you play this while eating.

On the other hand, the meaning of Neverending Nightmares is much deeper than just nasty pictures. This game was created by people who really suffer from psychological illnesses and have suffered a lot in life. Essentially, this dark quest is a living adaptation of their inner pain, experiences and nightmares, which a random player is invited to plunge headlong into. The game consists entirely of a bunch of mental illnesses, many of which can be seen in various endings and even game locations. You can endlessly analyze the meaning of the endings, look for secret signs in the plot and analyze nightmare scenes frame by frame, but this will lead to absolutely nothing. Anyone who enters the territory of Neverending Nightmares will have to come to terms with the fact that nothing will help Thomas and all that remains is to simply take the horrors he saw for granted.

Neverending Nightmares desperately resists being understood. This game masterfully hides the true meaning behind masks and constantly replaces concepts so that the player never understands what is happening on the screen. A dream, a vision or a nightmare - it makes no difference where Thomas is, but it is much more important to determine for yourself who he really is. From the point of view of plot and gameplay, a rather ambiguous quest with a complete lack of action, but the visuals can surprise you with unexpected images and test the degree of your disgust. Although the game offers three playable endings, even a single journey through the world of Neverending Nightmares will plunge you headlong into Thomas' clouded mind, where a broken man's worst nightmares reside. This pleasant mixture of suspense and cruelty may well brighten up your evening, giving you new reasons for gloomy thoughts.

I am pretty sure Neverending Nightmares is set in the late 1800s to give its edward gorey riff more authenticity, in the perfectly naïve way that indie games plumb this or that aesthetic in order to stand out, rather ignorant of what they’re standing in. still, the extravagant wealth portrayed in this facsimile of high living could have only been accumulated through slavery or colonialism (or of course, both). implicitly then, racism and class war drape the warped nursery that facilitates playing chicken with the protagonist’s misogynistic impulses, ones that he inevitably succumbs to in his imagination, again and again. notably, only ever in his imagination. he is fighting the ghosts of his unconscious drive, things that he inherited but does not ever quite completely understand.

if there is a coherent story, it’s only to create a non-productive, schizo-oedipal between sister/daughter/wife. it is very enjoyable to me how much the author does not understand freud, because the legacy of freud is much better mangled like this and made into worthless dead-ends. so it is interesting, then, how much the game delimits its own potential. its mechanics are ever-present, and demand some joke-like spectrum of mastery. but they do not develop really. and the game still resists being stripped down to its essential components, adding disjunctions and doodads that lead to non-linear, non-connecting zones. or more often, plain, gratuitous, horrible self-violence, as if it is the only possible response to what the protagonist has inherited. the idea of non-productive flows comes to my mind, in a way that naturally stymies and cuts off the post-Silent Hill 2 psychodrama in a way that’s a mixture of stoic deliberation and totally natural submission into a complete portrayal of impulses (also, budget constraints, lol).

and so much like this. there’s a dream sequence in The Book of Franza by ingeborg bachmann where a father points out to his daughter: “this is the cemetery of buried daughters,” and hearing this she sobs. this exchange, metaphor doubled, is charged with patriarchal violence, seeming to say, I will bury you there, or, haven’t I already? yet it’s also farcical, as the father and daughter yet live, and the implication hangs on without ever getting held on. if I’m able to step outside of jung for a moment, I can re-recognize this scene as shared grief. the position-in-relation, instead of the position-of-satisfaction. should we not mourn for the daughters? I think this counterfactual in vain, the specter of neurosis looms all around, and I don’t yet know how to forgive it.

I love many scenes in books and I don’t end up remembering them. I’ve held on to this one like a reality marble, a final projection, and I think it’s because it’s a physical place. a place you can look at and go to, one you can walk around in. this physical, dreamed up allegory of endings, is… well it’s a lot like a videogame, to me. it is, I guess, the evil version of the museum of dead wifery, one that’s to be taken at face value, instead of integrated into an ironic system. it provokes a stale romanticism, a domestic grief, a remove from the problems, as they’re used to garnish existing grief, that is converted into relation only by a selfish desire to embody the more difficult, accumulated forms of covalent suffering from this place of remove.

lots of games are like this, including Neverending Nightmares. I suppose if I had more integrity I would condemn it, if I believed art is our vehicle into a better world. cecile pineda wrote that writing can “…provide a moment of grace, both for her who writes and him who reads, in a very dark world.” her novel Face is almost a constructive case against degradation, as it refuses to be specifically one problem of degradation. and so like that book, it is a stupid, pithy fact that I relate to the honest depictions of intrusive violence in Neverending Nightmares. maybe not all of them at once, and maybe not as much anymore, but if I could discard every mistake and thoughtcrime I’ve made at once, I probably wouldn’t be writing about games anymore.