In Nightmarena you play as near-faceless karate enthusiast Gerald Ventures, a warrior of the Church of Jaysi who is tasked by said church to retrieve a magical relic; the reward for which will be advancement in Gerald’s career. The relic is awarded to one who can best the titular Nightmarena, and while its powers are unclear there are implications that seizing this bauble will in some way help Gerald overcome his tragic backstory and deal with the death of his parents.
The Nightmarena itself seems to be a formless, esoteric realm constituting several floors, either as a tower or a dungeon (this is not made clear, although the latter seems to be the case as between floors Gerald falls through a hole to advance), and on each floor Gerald must do battle with one (or more) of the tower’s denizens.
It is not made clear who made the Nightmarena, nor why one should particularly care about Gerald or his quest - characterisation is scant, and tends towards the comedic rather than having anything approaching theming, or complex motivation. Gerald wants to get a promotion at his job. There’s a demon. Go fight your way through hordes of monsters to make that happen by nabbing a crystal.
The story takes an extreme backseat to the action, but occasionally rears its head in the form of intermission-style dialogue sequences between fights. It’s as cookie-cutter as it is possible to be, and serves mostly as a framing device for the game’s battles, which are simultaneously the highlight and downfall of Nightmarena.
Unlike a traditional RPG - especially using RPG Maker - Nightmarena’s battles while turn-based choose focus on action, and timed sequences rather than tactics or planning. The controls are faintly baffling, and will take some getting used to for a couple of reasons:
> Gerald doesn’t actually react to your button presses intuitively, instead having your directional inputs mapped to several arbitrary actions, such as selecting an attack or dodging in one of three directions
> There is no grace period or confirmation required when selecting an action, which maintains the momentum of fights albeit at the cost of actually feeling like the player is making deliberate, considered decisions
To attack, on Gerald’s turn a bar will appear and the player is required to use a directional input to tell Gerald what to do, be it attacking, throwing a fireball, healing, or doing nothing. There are three bars to manage in your health, MP, and TP, and various actions cost these resources. Where the game falls down is a complete lack of onscreen tutorialisation (outside pausing) for what each of these actions are, and if you select the wrong one (for example, trying to heal without the requisite MP) your entire turn is forfeited and you are forced to endure the enemy’s next attack having achieved nothing.
This friction would be permissible if the enemies’ attacks were in any way intuitive, or well-programmed. Outside the first couple of floors, where a simple duck or backstep will dodge the swing of a weapon, they are not. A big part of this is the manner in which the game has been cobbled together - RPG Maker is not an engine particularly well-suited to this kind of Punch-Out aping combat, and what you’re seeing on the screen is actually not representative of what is happening under the hood.
There are no hitboxes, and everything is done on hard-coded timing rather than interaction between Gerald and whatever is being thrown at him - a large icon appearing to assist the player in when they should press the incoming attack’s corresponding dodge button. Because of this the thing you will mostly feel when playing Nightmarena is frustration - and while Punch-Out works on broadly the same system, that game has things like unique art and masterful game design to telegraph to the player when their input is necessary.
Nightmarena lacks either of these things, using stock assets to passable effect, but broadly failing in conveying to the player what dodge goes with what attack. This isn’t a universal issue, and a big part of the game’s Roguelite structure and progression is the repetition of fights, so after you’ve seen an enemy a couple of times you should be able to comfortably avoid all damage. The flipside of this is that the game’s enemy variety is immediately hamstrung by the lack of unique graphics, and reuse is constant and rapidly loses its shine
The later floor enemies’ attacks also lack conveyance of any kind, such as the wolves who put numbers on your screen which the player must arbitrarily match to dodge actions through observation, trial and error - or the Nagas whose combo length verges on the ridiculous by the end of the game
Combine this with an engine fundamentally unsuited to this kind of combat and you end up with a product whose strength (enemy variety, some novel attacks) is undermined by the very nature of the game on display
There’s a lot to like about Nightmarena’s enemy design - some enemies feature novel concepts, such as a priest whose attacks can heal gerald if you dodge into them, or a tribesman whose attacks are easy to block but who has lit a rhythmic fire totem behind Gerald forcing you to choose whether to burn yourself or take the hit.
If this were made in another engine, with unique art, a lot of what there is to love about Nightmarena would really shine. Unfortunately this is not the case, and what you end up with is a game whose defining characteristic is its jank. For a game which has been in production for years, with a publisher on board to catch these issues, it is deeply confusing that it has been allowed to release in this state.
Indictments of the combat aside, another area the game tries-but-falters in is the economy of progression. The game is set up as a Roguelite, with no overworld or towns, but instead a run-based dungeon-delve where fights play out one after the other. This is somewhat novel, but sharing a release window with Slay the Spire 2 really demonstrates how important design nouse and balance tuning is to an experience with this kind of gameplay loop.
Each fight provides Gerald with “Energi”, a simple numeric resource which persists between runs. This can be spent on upgrading Gerald’s stats, making early floors a doddle, and allowing the player to more easily move through the game - or can be spent on permanent upgrades such as new moves or the ability to skip Floor 1 (but only Floor 1, bafflingly)
This is pretty standard Roguelite fare, with costs compounding roughly inline with reward as the player gets deeper into the Nightmarena, but the balance is comically off both in terms of how quickly the player can become overtuned - and more crucially, in the rewards offered
For example, why would the player choose to fight an optional superboss which gives you 1850 Energi, when they can receive 1000 Energi for free, without any risk of losing to said superboss?
Why would I skip Floor 1 when the Energi rewards for Floor 2 and beyond are not substantially higher, and in spending my early upgrades on pure numbers-go-up make farming resources on Floor 1 more time-efficient than going to the harder fights of Floor 2?
It’s simply not very well thought out.
To summarise, the game never fully endears you to its setting, characters, or world, at least not in a way which would motivate anyone to actually finish the thing. Combat is endearingly janky at best and out-and-out broken at worst. The use of stock assets leads to endless frustration as attacks are poorly telegraphed and must be learned through rote memorisation and recital rather than the kind of intuition and instinct allowed for in games like Punch-Out, Legend of Dragoon, or the Mario and Luigi series
While there is a lot to like about Nightmarena, those things are all undermined by the limitations within which the game has been forced to work - not by some unseen hand, but by decisions on the part of the developer and publisher.
Glad I bought it though
