Puppet Nightmares
, formerly Pocket Nightmares, is a web game made by Ignis in January of 2008. An evil toy maker is luring children into a nightmare filled world, to manipulate their souls and rob them of their innocence.
Only you can collect and unlock the powerful Soul Puppets, also formerly Pocket Nightmares, that are needed to stop his madness.
This game provides examples of:
- The Alcoholic: The Peddler
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: An early side-quest has you collect panties from several of the most beautiful women in Niflheim... and while you're SUPPOSED to return them to the quest-giver (a perverted statue), you can break off the quest at any point in order to keep the panties. And yes, your creatures can wear them. The final pair the quest sends you after, the Golden Panties, are actually one of the top-two most Stylish wearables for female puppets, making them highly sought-after.
- Big Bad: The Toymaker
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Without spending credit, players can't have any more than one full party of monsters (and two spares). If they're fully equipped, there's not even room for looted equipment.
- The equipment crafting system is also rife with this; even if the equipment creation doesn't fail, there's no guarantee it won't be complete trash. Unless you get the right items from the Credit Shop, of course.
- Besides buying, credit can be gained by voting for the game on popularity lists, winning fights and a variety of other methods. But it's a relatively slow process, averaging out to about 50-75 credit per day, depending on how active you are.
- Cat Girl: The Neko, obviously.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
- Great and superb rank monsters are supposed to be extremely rare for the players, yet it seems that two-thirds of the enemies in the later parts of Episode 2 have these quality levels. Of course, this is somewhat a result of the way enemies work - the Special Skills they have access to depend on their quality-level, so only a Superb version has access to the full skillset. Hence, unless a Superb version of a given enemy spawns SOMEWHERE, it never gets to use its full skillset. (On the other hand, players can teach all the skills to any puppet regardless of quality.)
- Depending on the area, monsters have chances to cause status effects on attacking. In the aforementioned later areas, the chance can go up to 30%; for perspective, players would have to be very lucky, rich, or devoted to crafting to get as much as 25%.
- Continuing is Painful: Continuing after getting a game over results in losing all non-permanent equipment, consumable items, marbles, and a large amount of coins.
- Cute and Psycho: Eva, the credit shop clerk.
- Cute Monster Girl: Over half of the obtainable Soul Puppets fall into this trope... though their exact degree of cuteness varies.
- Dem Bones: Several types of skeleton enemies, as well as Pierce Bones, the skeletal weapon-salesman of the first city.
- Disk One Nuke: The first four Soul Puppets you can get can easily be molded into this.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: At the difficulty selection screen, the picture for the Easy difficulty shows several Soul Puppets descending from a rainbow.
- Fate Worse than Death: If you game over, you lose your soul and get trapped in the miniature game world forever, slowly losing your memories, becoming a soulless husk in the real world.
- Fan Disservice: Yeah, you know that Cute Monster Girl on your team? The one with her cleavage showing? Oh, and the sexy, seductive Keli? Yeah, both of them are about ten inches tall, and the one in your team is about as smart as your dog. Sorry.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: Eva, Pierce, and Orion do this when they get significantly angry.
- Killer Rabbit: Used verbatim. The Killer Rabbit is an EXTREMELY rare puppet of the 'Genetic Mistake' type, which can occur randomly when breeding. Apparently, it's an ordinary rabbit that's been infected with some sort of 'The Thing'-ish parasite.
- Law of Chromatic Superiority: The different tiers of Soul Puppets manifest in different colors.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Keli is a magic teaching, valley girl talking, sexy young lady who likes to spend her time hanging in her own grave "putting missionaries in their position."
- Political Overcorrectness: Inverted. Since this game is 'adults only', and produced by basically one guy, the creator has gleefully set forth to include things no 'big-budget' game would ever dare use. Thus, available Puppets include a White Trash Biker Dwarf with access to special moves such as 'Domestic Violence' and 'Hate Crime', and the Ameise, a nazi ant with access to a selection of genocidal moves (and the 'Self Portrait' special, of course). And yes, both of them use swastikas in their design, which means that this game is technically illegal to play in Germany...
- The Speechless: Popin, the resident egg painter, is a zombified rabbit that has no lower jaw, so he speaks through actions and painted bark.
- Succubi and Incubi: There's a Succubus monster, but she just amounts to an archer who happens to wear prostitute clothes.
- Sweet Tooth: Neko are unlocked by acquiring 150 Chocolate Mice.
- Taken for Granite: The crafting NPC Orion is stuck as a statue. It's assumed around the NPCs that the Toy Maker did it as punishment for his extreme perverted tendencies.
