This week I am playing a few games that I received on Keymailer. I usually never accept free games because I want to support the developers as much as possible, but to be able to catch a lot of the smaller games coming out I made a profile.

This week is a horror game titled Jim’s Nightmare from Pumpkiny and Sky Den Games. The game will be released for the PC into early access on June 4th. Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from keymailer.com

Jim’s nightmare, though will be put into early access will be cheaper than when the game releases fully later on, the full game will have six whole chapters. Pay once get them all.

In the first chapter of the game, you play as Jim, an ex-gangster who has settled down and removed himself from the crime world. He has a wife and a pretty good life, a little dark, but it’s decent. Jim though suffers from mental illness. He is a man that has seen some stuff when he was doing the crimes and it has taken a toll on his mental. On top of that Jim has a mysterious fellow following him trying to kill him. The aim is to find out what the hell is going on before this stranger kills you.

Jim’s Nightmare at its core is a point-and-click adventure. You have an isometric view that shows the player the whole area in which Jim can travel, and you gloss over items to read descriptions and pick up relevant items to use later on. The game begins with an onboarding puzzle that requires you to feed some house plants and microwave some lasagna. Easy to say the least but the player is introduced to the mechanics of the game very well.

At the beginning of the game you can choose a build for Jim that includes intelligence, boldness, and senses that will later on allow you to pass checks and make decisions based don’t the number of those attributes.

The base mechanics work well enough and attributes come into play on more than a few occasions which make you feel like the mechanic is vital to the game.

There are also a plethora of puzzles that really rack the mind. A lot of the time puzzles in point-and-click games require you to just click everything and see if it works, but Jim’s Nightmare really emphasizes the reading of notes and descriptions to get the full answer before going in. It is a nice way to introduce answers to puzzles and it really does make you feel smart when you figure out the puzzle.

The game looks relatively good for being a pixel game. There were points when I was really weirded out by the horror scenes that made my stomach churn a little bit. When the horror is not evident, then the game looks really nice with ambient lighting and attention to detail in the environment.

The sound design is really quite good when you put headphones on. The gruesome sounds and screams really reverberate in the headphones. Pumpkiny game did the sound design right. The voice acting is fine, I really don’t have an issue with it. Sometimes it felt really forced and it really kinda put me off some sections of dialogue.

I will be honest, I didn’t finish the game. I got too frustrated.

Jim’s Nightmare was a fun experience while it lasted. I had fun figuring out the puzzles, and being in the world that Pumpkiny has created. The issues lie within a puzzle in a certain area. A murderer is running at you and you need to find a way to evade him to fully run away. This section has a really poor execution of the puzzle. The man is so fast and you put you down like a fucking dog almost immediately and when that happens, you are sent back to a part where you have to retrieve something and it just wastes so much time.

I tried so hard, reader, to complete this section and get going into the longer sections of the first chapter and I just couldn’t do it.

Jim’s Nightmare was a fun experience, with its pretty good look and sound design, but the dialogue boxes with the weird-looking character models and the incredibly frustrating puzzle section in the first half of the game make the game really fall short for me.

If you like point-and-click and horror games then I am sure that Jim’s Nightmare is for you, but the game is most certainly not for me.

6/10