Neverending Nightmares is a hard game to give a less-than-glowing review to, considering that the guy who put it together apparently crammed a lot of his personal experience with very, very bad mental states into it. Eventually all the symbolism clicks into place, all the confused narrative suddenly becomes coherent, and you immediately gain a whole hell of a lot empathy for our poor impotent protagonist. Unfortunately, along the way to that glorious, agonizing trio of endings you have to put up with the game itself, and that's not nearly as enjoyable a prospect as I'd hoped.

In NN, you play a man named Thomas who wakes up with a start in his bed, only to find as he explores his home that all is not well. The decor is decidedly morbid, the furniture dusty and broken, the house itself in a dangerous state of disrepair. You walk the familiar halls, and then you notice the blood. Drips and drabs, usually, but in places great spatters, and then you see the meat, hear the crying, and then you find Gabbie, except she's dead, a knife in her belly in a clear suicide, but that's not right, you did it, you stabbed her, but that's not right, she's fine, Gabbie's not d

And then you wake up, and you get out of bed. But as you explore your home you find that all is not well.

The concept here is fantastic, and it's executed wonderfully when you first set out. The artwork is the most obvious strength; pretty much every inch of design is dripping with Edward Gorey influence, and who better to illustrate dismembered children than the master? Just as critical is the sound work. While perhaps not so unearthly and unsettling as the audio in the Silent Hill series, NN's whispers and screams can definitely get under one's skin from time to time. I strongly recommend playing with a good set of headphones in the dark, as maintaining atmosphere is critical to enjoying the game... which is sadly something it's really bad at helping you along with.

As good as the artwork may be, the fine people at Infinitap really, really wanted to hammer home a sense of obsessive-compulsive disorder to go along with the suicidal depression themes. Faithful to that goal, the artwork is recycled to an excruciating degree. The first time you see a maimed toy soldier or cracked doll girl staring at you with dead eyes, you can appreciate it. The hundredth time it happens in a single hour of game play, you're filtering it out. The same goes for the ghastly portraiture, the spider webs, the blood spatters, the intestines... For a good portion of the game, you feel less like you're wandering through a carefully crafted diorama of mental anguish and more like you're stuck in some random number generator's attempt at gore-horror. Eventually the repetition gets the desired effect across, and I applaud the intent here, but until it actually works you're simply annoyed by it all.

Other fumbles are less easily blamed on design philosophy. The game play itself takes a massive chunk out of any sense of immersion for a few reasons. First off, your controls are extremely simple: you can walk around, run for short lengths of time, or examine objects. With such a bare bones control set, the game tries to make you feel like you're actually playing something the only way it knows how: through really bad stealth action. 90% of the game is spent simply traveling further and further into horrible places, but every now and then monsters are thrown at you, and you must bypass them using terribly unoriginal stealth tricks, such as hiding in a closet or timing your movement so you never get close enough to notice. Used in moderation, adversaries could have greatly improved the general sense of anxiety you're supposed to be feeling, but instead they just make you remember that you're playing a video game and this is just another obstacle to bypass.

Examining your environment is even worse. Any time you find an object you can look closer at, it'll be colored, unlike the all black-and-white background of everything else. Doing so really accomplishes nothing; usually you just see more spookily arranged dolls, unsettling bits of meat, or horrible murdered loved ones, and all of those get caught up in your repetition filter real fast. Every now and then they throw in a sassy jump scare, but those don't contribute too much in the end. On top of that, the game suffers a bit from Kickstarter Love. Donators who gave above a certain threshold got to have their faces immortalized in game, in the form of large portraits you come across every so often. Initially, I thought these would be story-related in some way, family members that were influential on the developer's life or key villains to be discovered down the line. Nope. They're just a bunch of very nice people who gave a lot of money to this man to make a game. And that's fine, that's all well and good, but it tears you even further out of the sense of immersion, and by that point you're noticing the awkward animations, and you're sick of the protagonist's pitiful endurance for running, and you're wondering why you're even playing.

It took me much longer to finish Neverending Nightmares than I expected it to, simply because it sapped my motivation hard about halfway through. Upon beating it, I only dug up the remaining endings out of some sense of obligation to do so before reviewing it, and I am extremely grateful I did so, even if I needed the help of a walk through to have any clue regarding how to get which ending. When all is said and done, NN is a hell of a narrative that gets the sense of a man's agony across quite well, but its many flaws can't be ignored. A stunning last act in a film can win over an ugly crowd, but only until they stop afterwards and think about all the complaints they had along the way and all the pieces that never quite fit. I applaud Infinitap Games for putting this together, and I know a good number of people who might eventually appreciate playing this, but in the end I just can't say the experience added up to a good game.