Neverending Nightmares

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Neverending Nightmares is a short little 2D-ish horror game. I finally installed it after its been sitting on my steam library for years, because I noticed it says its only about 1-2 hours long.
The thing thats unique and striking about this game is the handrawn pencil style graphics.
This actually works quite well and has a certain charm and unique quality to it.
The graphics are definitely the most interesting part of the experience, a lot of stencil shading and clever drawing tricks to portray light and darkness is a nice touch.

The game follows a very simplistic and minimalistic pathway and gameplay.
You're a young boy/man that wakes up from bed and continue to experience nightmares.
You walk around this house, presumably trying to escape the nightmare.
You'll find the typical tropes, weird dolls that smile at you, blood on the walls, dark basements that suddenly kill you.
Theres not that many items to find in the game, or puzzles to solve or anything really.
Sometimes you'll need to grab a candle and walk around with it to progress, or another time you need to grab an axe to break a door, but theres really not much collecting or puzzles to solve.
 Mostly, the gameplay consists of walking through corridors, looking at anything with a color which means it can be interacted with because otherwise the game is in black and white, and going through doors - often times doors that lead to rooms with nothing in them, then trying to find the right door to progress.
Sometimes, youll come across monsters that kill you. Thankfully, if you die, you always awake in a room nearby to try again.
Theres only a few types of enemies, a giant beast where you have to run away and hide in a closet, a mental patient that sprints at you and kills you, took me awhile to figure out that hes blind and reacts only to sound so you cant sprint (had to google it actually) , and another monster of a girl that drags a knife on the ground, you just walk away then walk back and shes gone.  
The game does have some pretty edgy grim moments which I appreciated, like women hanging and dismembered corpses with babies ripped out of them and other weird stuff.

The game has some entertaining moments and enemies and some OK atmosphere and scares, but sadly it has a few crucial flaws that make it not an amazing experience.

- The gameplay is frankly very shallow and minimal, theres not really much to do besides run through corridors over and over. Theres only 2 buttons, interact and sprint. No items to collect or much things to see, only locations are a house, then a short cemetery/forest. then mental asylum.


- The biggest flaw that almost ruins any enjoyment of the game - The SPRINT is abysmal. Your character is CONSTANTLY making an obviously loud stupid gasping out of breath noise, like you play as some debilitated nerdy guy with chronic asthma, seriously if you try to run at all, your guy will start moaning and panting for like 30 seconds straight, and if you hold it for even slightly too long he just stops moving to catch breath for so long. I think they tried to penalize you for sprinting to try to pad out the game length cause they know its so short and not much to it, but even if they toned down the breathing sounds it would have been more tolerable. But it almost ruins any atmosphere the game has to hear your guy constantly moaning out of breath even though you only ran for 3 seconds.

That's really all there is to the game, I beat it in 90 minutes, its not too frustrating or bad to get through or anything, but its nothing exciting gameplay wise either.
The plot was kind of entertaining to try to guess and figure out whats going on, stuff about guilt and broken family, like speculating that you keep having nightmares with creepy dolls and dead girls because you killed your sister or something, in the end it just turned out that your daughter died and youre struggling to cope or something.
Its notable for its unique and charming handrawn graphic style, but other than that its a pretty basic, simplistic, almost Adobe-Flash esque little game, with some really obnoxious breathing sound effects.

6/10