Richy's Nightmares

Review

Welcome to Richy's Nightmares. Join Richy, our protagonist, as he overcomes his fear, and heads out into a world full of traps and puzzles.  The journey is full peril and death; run, jump and think your way through this bizarre world that awaits him. This will not be your average stroll through the woods on a beautiful day. You will need your reflexes and wits if you are to survive this fantasy world. The traps can be brutal and the puzzles will have you needing your thinking cap.

Richy's Nightmares is the first of two titles, self-published and released in July 2018 on Steam by developer, Unreal Gaming. As most can tell by the trailers and screenshots, it is a clone of titles like Albert and Otto and Limbo. Similar to those titles, it has a dark foreground with fluorescent film grained backgrounds, along with ever-changing traps and puzzles; the gameplay will have you wondering what is coming next.

I had a hard time at first because of the controls. The jumping in the game is a bit hard to master, but once you get the hang of the timing it becomes a lot more enjoyable. After 20 mins of playing the game it was actually enjoyable for me. I really loved some of the trap and puzzle designs.  The game has a minimalistic art style that is very well done. The hand drawn art is what really stands out, they did some beautiful work with it. It has a decent musical score that is not too over-powering and slightly eerie.

Now onto my issues with this title . . .

I’ll start with the broken launcher. After purchase and installation, the Steam launcher looks for a RLauncher.exe, for which there is no file in the game folder. You can fix this yourself by opening the games folder and making a shortcut to pin to the desktop for Richy's Nightmares.exe: alternatively, if you want the game to launch with Steam, you must rename the Richy's Nightmares.exe to RLauncher.exe, and the Richy's Nightmares_data folder to RLauncher_data, and the game will run as expected through the Steam shortcut. I attempted to contact support through the discussions thread, but have not received any feedback from the developer, along with other people posting about this issue.

The controls . . . mainly the jumping feature has a very odd timing effect; it does not register for a few milliseconds, which is quite frustrating when you start playing. You can overcome this issue with a bit of practice to get the timing right.

There is a lack of user settings; there are only language settings, with no settings for audio or video at all. We really could have used the ability to turn down or turn off the film grain and brightness of the game, as after less than an hour of gameplay, I would get a headache from the amount of film grain the game uses.

When it is all said and done: I found I did enjoy the title.  I am stuck at one puzzle, however; neither my son nor myself (whose platforming skills surpass my own) could get past. I will try some more to see where I missed something. If they fix the issues they currently have in the game, it could be a game I would recommend at a much higher score.  In its current state, I will still recommend the title: but truthfully, not unless you can get it with a major discount or in a bundle.

Review written by DamageInc.for Zeepond.com!