Nightmare Creatures

I remember that feeling when I first launched Nightmare Creatures on my PC and heard that muffled, raw roar of the first creature coming through the speakers. I was about sixteen then, and the foggy Victorian London hit me completely differently than any dungeon crawling I was used to.

Kalisto Entertainment bet on gothic horror atmosphere in 1997. The action takes place in London in 1834, where the city is consumed by chaos caused by a strange manuscript and the mad experiments of some guy named Crowley. The result is streets filled with mutated creatures, shambling undead, and mass panic. The player chooses one of two protagonists — the priest Ignatius or the young woman Nadia — and ventures through this hell.

The gameplay is straightforward beat-'em-up action in the spirit of popular 3D third-person action games of the time. You move through corridors between buildings, smashing creatures with axes and sticks, and try to survive. The combat system works, but doesn't have much depth — most enemies can be dealt with by repeating the same combo. The camera does what it can, which in practice means you sometimes don't see what's jumping at you from behind. Classic era stuff.

What keeps Nightmare Creatures afloat even today is the atmosphere. Kalisto had a sense for lighting, tight alleyways, and sound design that worked even on the hardware of the time. The game didn't look like the best product of 1997, but it looked convincingly grim — and that was more important in the horror genre. Technically it was a solid port of a console title, so the PC version feels a bit awkward in its controls, and you need to get used to it on the keyboard.

Today Nightmare Creatures suits those who want to experience a time when 3D action was just finding its shape and nobody quite knew what it should look like. It's not a technical or gaming masterpiece — it's a document of atmosphere and the courage to go into dark settings without apologies. If you don't mind the short playtime, a camera from another era, and combat that would pass for a mobile game today, you'll have a pleasant few evenings with it. And maybe you'll remember why we used to play with the lights off.