This guy has Resident Evil 17 at home.
Nightmare of Decay is a First Person Retraux Survival Horror game by one-person indie developer Checkmaty, using the Unity engine and released on Steam on May 3rd, 2022. The game is a Homage to the first Resident Evil game on the Playstation 1, with Playstation-era graphics, except played from first-person in a fully 3D engine.
The game takes place in an unnamed city where people have been disappearing after experiencing several days of nightmares and hallucinations. You, the game's unnamed player character, have been experiencing nightmares and hallucinations, and watching a news report about the disappearances certainly doesn't help. After going to sleep, you find yourself waking up in a nightmare world where you're trapped in a mansion infested by zombies. A talking cat you meet warns you that you've been pulled into the Nightmare and that no one escapes the Nightmare alive.
Nightmare of Decay contains examples of:
- Affably Evil: The Creature in the Hole is a disturbing creature that likes to collect human heads, but he is strangely cordial and gives you a collection sidequest... to get him three female heads. When you do this, he gives you a gracious reward of high-value supplies. Surprisingly, he's the LEAST hostile thing in the Nightmare.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- If you're going for the knife/melee only run, using the pellet gun does not void the challenge. A godsend that allows you to make use of Boss-Arena Idiocy while fighting the Chainsaw Psycho.
- In an update when exhausting the Sprint Meter, you don't enter the "Exhausted" state when there aren't any enemies, allowing you to easily backtrack or traverse the mansion.
- Bait-and-Switch Boss: In the final area of the game, much of your time is spent following a shotgun-wielding cultist who's carrying one of the silver seals. When you finally catch up to him in a big boss arena, he's eaten by a giant tarantula, who becomes the actual boss fight.
- BFS: Some of the enemies are armed with swords and most of them are pretty large and intimidating. Not to mention the Lord of the Nightmare, who carries a massive and lengthy katana-esque sword, their default stance even has their Weapon Across the Shoulder.
- Black Comedy: The game shows elements of this, including a presence of a talking cat, several Lawyer Friendly Cameos, as well as one of the Boss characters being a literal Killer Rabbit.
- Boss in Mook's Clothing: The Regenerator-like zombie that's encountered guarding one of the silver seals doesn't have a boss health bar, but it might as well be a boss in any other regard.
- Cats Are Mean: A talking black cat can be found wandering around the mansion. It's not hostile to you, but not particularly sympathetic to your predicament either, remarking that watching you trying to survive through the mansion before your inevitable death will be entertaining. The cat does give you a key after you help get it out of a washing machine it got trapped in and does at least wish you luck.
- Chainsaw Good: Well... not so good when one Chainsaw Psycho in the basement is eager to use this trope against you. His attacks are predictably lethal.
- Collection Sidequest: Within the mansion you can encounter a Creature in Hole. If you can get past its intimidating presence, it simply asks you to collect three female heads for him. Completing this errand has it reward you with two vials of Holy Water as well as some magnum ammo.
- Critical Hit: Headshots against zombies have a very small chance of popping their head, resulting in an instant kill. The critical hit chance on the shotgun is much higher, and it kills zombies in one shot most of the time anyway.
- Crowbar Combatant: Later in the game you can find a crowbar; it has longer range than the survival knife and can be charged for a strong power attack, making it a much more viable weapon.
- Cruel Twist Ending: After you defeat the Lord of the Nightmare, you seemingly wake back up in your apartment and decide to look around to be safe, only to walk down the hall outside and run into the cat once more who taunts you that nobody escapes the nightmare before a monster emerges from the shadows beyond to attack you.
- Decapitation Presentation: The Early-Bird Cameo for the Chainsaw Psycho has him carrying a decapitated head as the player hallucinates them. Later on, after beating him and getting the key to the bloody wardrobe, you are greeted with the Psycho holding a decapitated head. Although he acts docile for the most part (yet still grinning menacingly) and just gives you the head he had been carrying without much issue.
- Do Not Run with a Gun: You can try to shoot while walking, but you'd become woefully inaccurate, and it may take a bit of standing still before you'd be able to have perfect aim. Getting hit also knocks out your aim, and reloading slows your movement speed to a crawl.
- Driven to Suicide: In a library on the second floor you can find another victim who's been pulled into the Nightmare, just as he commits suicide with a revolver rather than continue to face the horrors. You can take his revolver from his corpse, as it's the game's Magnum.
- Early-Bird Cameo: While in the real world, the player hallucinates a scary-looking blood-soaked man carrying a decapitated head. He later on reappears in the Nightmare realm as the Chainsaw Psycho.
- Easing into the Adventure: The game starts inside the protagonist's apartment and tasks the player with preparing and eating a slice of pizza, taking a shower, turning off the TV and going to sleep before the Nightmare proper starts.
- Elite Mooks: Cultists are much more dangerous than zombies due to being intelligent humans; they run around fairly quickly and are armed with firearms (pistols and even occasionally shotguns). Fortunately they're quite rare with only about 5 of them appearing throughout the game.
- Emergency Weapon: The first weapon you get is a survival knife, and you'll have to use it to kill your first zombie in order to get the pistol. Due to its low damage and very limited range, it's very much for emergencies only.
- Featureless Protagonist: The protagonist is never shown and nothing is revealed about them except that they live along in an apartment and play video games. Though their various pain and exertion grunts do sound distinctly male.
- Fingore: One NPC you can happen upon is one that is Drowning His Sorrows which gets cut short by a cultist blasting his drinking hand off. Later on in the dungeons you get to see a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo version of James Sunderland who gets brutally murdered by a shotgun-wielding cultist, getting shot point blank with a shotgun, before being shot again while Not-James was raising his hand.
- First-Person Ghost: The protagonist is so featureless that the held weapons in first person view are portrayed as simply floating, without the hands to hold them up.
- Giant Spider: A SUV-sized spider is guarding one of the silver seals in the final area of the game, being the Bait-and-Switch Boss after it kills the shotgun-wielding cultist that you were following.
- Haunted House: The game takes place in an semi-abandoned mansion filled with all sorts of horrors; from zombies, cultists to other kinds of the undead threats and more. You learn later that the mansion's previous owner discovered a centuries-old hidden dungeon underneath the house and was possessed by an evil force there, prompting him to murder his servants and wife.
- He Knows Too Much: The last diary entry from Lord William outright states his intent to kill off the servants that installed a wardrobe over the hole to the dungeon for this reason.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The extra game modes unlock special infinite ammo weapons to be found in the campaign provided you'd ever get far enough within either of said modes. Completing Dungeon Escape unlocks the Infinite Submachine Gun while surviving past wave 10 in Horde Mode unlocks the Infinite Rocket Launcher.
- Joke Item: Played with the air pellet gun, while it has an obvious use for playing the target shooting mini-games and has infinite ammo. It's also something you carry around as a "weapon", it deals no damage to enemies and can only make them aggro at a range. Which is useful for a knife-only run at least.
- Killer Rabbit: Literally. One of the monsters in the dungeons is an actual white rabbit covered in blood. Despite its small size, it's very strong, fast and durable. A swift player can outmaneuver it and run away far enough to escape its room, but that too is a challenge.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: A few related to Silent Hill, which can also be seen as Death by Cameo.
- During the collection sidequest for the Creature in the Hole, the last female head you need to acquire is from an Insane Woman that is basically Angela from Silent Hill 2 also carrying a knife and ready to use it on the player, forcing them to kill her in self-defense and then cutting her head off with a knife.
- One cutscene in the dungeons has a man that looks suspiciously like James Sunderland, carrying a metal pipe on one hand and a silver disk in the other. He is cornered by the cultists but manages to kill at least one of them. Unfortunately this leaves him open to get executed by the Shotgun-wielding cultist rather brutally at that, before they retake the silver disk.
- You can also pass by a man in the dungeons bashing his head against the wall, once he finally kills himself you find that he's wearing clothes that look similar to Harry Mason's.
- Machete Mayhem: If you beat the game on Hard mode, you'd be able to unlock the Machete as a melee weapon for future playthroughs, campaign and extra modes included. With its high crit rate when charged, it easily ranks among the most powerful weapons to use on regular zombies.
- Off with Her Head!: Most of your weapons can reduce the zombies headless with enough shots. There's also a collection sidequest where you are inquired by a Creature from the Hole to get them three female heads. Two of them are from already dead corpses but the last one has you killing Not-Angela and then sawing her head off with a knife.
- Resources Management Gameplay: Ammo and healing items are limited and you need to manage them to not run out. Just like the original Resident Evil, on Normal difficulty if you explore thoroughly there is just enough ammo to kill more or less every enemy, as long as you don't waste ammo by using it ineffectively, such as wasting shotgun shells on weaker enemies.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: As expected the Magnum is a step up from the pistol, it deals high damage* and can also pierce through enemies allowing you to hit multiple zombies if you line them up. To balance this ammo for it is scarce and usually only find when doing optional objectives. Another balance is that there's also a noticeable delay between pressing the fire button and when the gun actually fires, due to needing to cock the hammer and pull the trigger.
- Schmuck Bait: An especially devious one, as it goes against what any survivor horror gamer would expect. In the back yard of the mansion, two zombie dogs are chowing down on a corpse, and it's actually possible to skirt around them to the supplies in the back corner and even enter the cabin once they have the key without even alerting the dogs to their presence. Cue the events in the cabin and two cultists will spawn by the back door of the mansion, leaving the player to now deal with a total of four enemies as opposed to just two when combat inevitably starts, with a good possibility of the player having enemies on either side of them.
- Shout-Out: The game pretty much wears its inspirations on its sleeve, making several references to various other Survival Horror games, although there are obviously references to other genres/medias.
- Entering the Nightmare realm has them waking up in a hollow grave like Caleb from Blood. Alongside that, later on you can encounter Cultist enemies that wear brown hooded robes and also shoot at you with guns. Said cultists also mutter to themselves periodically in Latin, similar to the cultists in Resident Evil 4 who do so in Spanish.
- The scene in which you encounter your first zombie is a direct reference to the same scene in the original Resident Evil.
- Several of the human NPCs that briefly appear are modeled on Silent Hill characters, most notably James and Angela from Silent Hill 2 and several men who resemble Harry Mason from the original Silent Hill.
- Save points being red notebooks are a clear allusion to the red squares from Silent Hill.
- At one point you need to collect 3 chemicals and put them in a mixing apparatus to create an acid to dissolve some Meat Moss, just like in Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
- The Meat Golem boss seems to be one to the Butcher from the first Diablo.
- The Chainsaw Psycho boss is one to both the chainsaw enemies from Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, Jack Baker from Resident Evil 7, as well as Sawyer from Cry of Fear. The last example has the most common with the Chainsaw Psycho in terms of boss fight mechanics, as you need to shoot the Chainsaw Psycho several times before he staggers, kneels and exposes his weakspot on his back.
- There's two target shooting mini-game booths found in different parts of the mansion, similar to Resident Evil 4.
- To enter the dungeon, the final area of the game, you must crawl through a large circular hole in the wall.
- After getting into the dungeon, you'd encounter a guy who bashes his head against the wall repeatedly until that kills him.
- A Boss in Mook's Clothing giant zombie in the dungeon wine cellar behaves like a Resident Evil 4 Regenerator.
- The Malicious Beast boss is the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If that wasn't enough you can also kill it with the Holy Water (being a stand in for the Holy Hand Grenade.
- Skippable Boss: Two of the bosses are skippable but this comes at the price of losing out on valuables.
- You can grab the key item and run out of the kitchen without bothering to fight the Meat Golem. Killing it gets you a key to a chest with some ammo and dynamite in it.
- A dying survivor warns you not to fight the Malicious Beast and to just run away from it, just outside the tunnels where the Malicious Beast is. You can in fact just grab the silver seal and run away when this causes the Malicious Beast to show up. However, you can kill the Malicious Beast for a key to a locked area with a first aid kit, some magnum ammo, and most valuably a vial of holy water.
- Slasher Smile: Fitting for his name, the Chainsaw Psycho constantly has a manic wide grin on his face even when he's not attacking you.
- Speaking Simlish: The dialogue in this game is vocalized Banjo-Kazooie/Animal Crossing style.
- Sprint Meter: The game has one, popping up as soon as the player starts sprinting in areas with enemies, and it can take quite a while before it would start refilling. Letting it reach zero causes the "Exhausted" effect, which makes the player move even slower than if it would use normal movement without sprinting. As of the update however, the trope does not apply in areas without enemies.
- Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: The last room before the Lord of the Nightmare fight is packed with supplies. The rooms that contain the keys to get there in the first place also contain smaller caches of goodies.
- Too Awesome to Use: Holy Water is extremely powerful (it makes the Magnum look like a peashooter) but also extremely rare, typically only found from doing optional objectives. If you save all 3 vials of Holy Water you can find throughout the game, you can use them to defeat the Final Boss in just a few seconds.
- Unique Enemy: The Chest Monster, Not-Angela and Not-Regenerador show up exactly once in the campaign.
- Weapon Across the Shoulder: The default stance for The Lord of the Nightmare.
- Wolfpack Boss: At one point you fight 3 animated suits of armor at once; one armed with a sword, the second armed with a poleaxe, and the third armed with a bow with some arrows. Hard mode adds a second bowman to the fight.
- Vague Hit Points: The game uses a Resident Evil style EKG meter to indicate health, which shows Fine/Green, Caution/Orange, or Danger/Red rather than an exact indicator of health. The game also doesn't prevent you from wasting a healing item if your health is already at 100%.
- Villain Respect: ...Maybe. After defeating the Chainsaw Psycho and getting the key to the bloody wardrobe, you are greeted by the Psycho holding a decapitated head you need for a sidequest. Strangely, he doesn't attack you, he's actually quite calm, albeit still grinning menacingly, and just gives you the head he had been carrying without much issue.
