Star Road

“Dark Souls from the 90’s” was something I’d heard about Nightmare Creatures before deciding to dig it out of my library recently. I’ve had this game for over 20 years, but I have no recollection of ever playing it. But recently–and you may have noticed this just by reading this site–I’ve been into 3rd person adventure games on the PS1, and Nightmare Creatures is a notable example of that genre. With the comparison to the notoriously hard FromSoftware series providing a bit of intimidation, I finally gave it a shot.

Right from the start, the lush graphics are impressive, especially considering this game is from 1997. The game case says it’s compatible with the analog joystick (SCPH-1110, the one that looks like a dual flight stick), but it does actually work with the analog controller.

And yes, I definitely played on Easy!

This game has an interesting mechanic where you basically have two life meters. The red one on the bottom is your traditional “health” that depletes when you are hit by an enemy. The blue meter on the left is “adrenaline” and constantly depletes; when it reaches zero, you start losing health. The clever part is that you refill adrenaline by killing a creature. Since creatures don’t spawn infinitely, if you get lost or take too long, you’ll die from running out of adrenaline; in order to progress in the game, you always have to keep moving (and killing).

I can’t tell if “Spitafield” is a typo, or by being in quotes it’s supposed to be the colloquial name. I’m going with the former.

I always love a good idle pose. This game follows the Tomb Raider philosophy of “if you’re gonna look at someone’s ass for a whole game, it better be a good ass.” Well, that’s true for this character, Nadia, anyway; I have not yet played as Ignatius, the male main character.

You mainly attack with melee attacks, and it’s quite tricky; this is where the Dark Souls comparison comes in. There are separate buttons for dodging left and right. There are fighting-game-esque button combos. And the enemies move around a lot so they are tricky to hit. Oh, and guess what? It’s from the mid 90’s, so it has tank controls!

Did I mention this game takes place in 1834 in London? Your secondary weapon is a pistol, which is extremely powerful. The intended balance here is that ammunition is fairly rare and you can only carry 9 bullets. However, by this point I had switched on an infinite ammo cheat to tilt the gameplay back in my favor, because the melee combat can get frustrating. I did actually play–and beat–this whole game with legit use of the adrenaline and life meters. Sure, it was on Easy, but still.

Ah, I always enjoy PS1 lighting techniques. Something you also may have noticed is that I’ve been playing with the xBR texture filter on. I almost always play with texture filtering to Nearest-Neighbor which gives it an original console look, and almost never use xBR because it tends to look like a melting oil painting. However, for this game it looked just right for me.

So much blood, so many ribcages.

There isn’t a ton of variety in the level designs, but the atmosphere is killer. The fog and snow really add to the feeling. I’m not sure if our clothes are cut out for such a London night, though.

Just like every other old horror game, the baddies are supposed to be scary, but they just look silly.

In the previous shot the short draw distance is a bit odd, but in this environment they masterfully used the lighting so it seems totally natural.

The animations are pretty cool; your character moves in a nice fluid way with good moves. By 1997 standards, of course.

Unfortunately, the clunky controls add a layer of frustration that’s exacerbated now that we live in a world of free camera and character movement.

As you progress through the game, you get new combos to use. I had a hard time trying to use these in the heat of the battle, so I just regressed to button mashing and the gun. But this is the extra level of intricacy that makes the game richer, for those who are into it anyway.

Swanky English…zombies? Actually, these are the “nightmare creatures”, made when experiments to create superhumans went wrong and created monsters. So basically Resident Evil in the 1800’s then.

The snow has finally piled up, and we get a slightly different environmental look (finally). You know, I didn’t even realize until I started putting together this post how similar all the levels look. Chalk that up to the efficient level design that keeps the game moving, so you don’t feel like you’re stuck in the same place forever.

Big boss fight! Are those…nipples?

Pretty cool environment for this fight.

Now here’s a good vocabulary word: wuthering. “To wuther” is a word from UK English that means “to blow with a dull roaring sound”. Now you know!

Oh, if there is a dinosaur you know I’m gonna get a screenshot. Not only are dinosaurs fascinating in general, I always love to see how they are represented in games.

By this point I was completely lost on the combos as they kept getting more and more complex. I’ve always sucked at fighting games because I struggle to input the fancy button combos, and I have the same issue with this game.

Ooh yeah, a wheeled conveyance. I wonder where all the horses went. Did they turn into nightmare creatures too?

This is probably my favorite screenshot of the game. I love this capture of myself getting hit and flying towards the edge of the screen. Most of the textures in this game are pretty low-resolution (hence the xBR filtering), but Nadia’s face is very detailed and sharp.

Unlike most other games, I was rarely tempted to dip into the “natural” look of this game: it just looks awful. There are so many straight lines in the environment, which are all wavy and crooked without PGXP turned on. The models just look so bad–not charming–in their original low res. And the dithering brings out a weird ugly purple hue in the fog. Check out the xBR filtering on the life meter; it really smooths out the pixel chunkiness and makes it look high res; unfortunately, it screws up the top pixel of the bar, so the red pokes above it.

Another area of constant fascination for me in PS1 games is how they handled fire effects. It looks cool in this game, with big bright dancing flames made of transparent layers. This is one area where the PS1 was significantly ahead of the Saturn: the latter struggled with transparency. Some say the Saturn couldn’t do transparency at all; well, that’s not quite true. Check out this short article for an interesting comparison and explanation.

Whoa, this boss actually looks pretty gnarly.

I enjoyed this one: you have to dodge the flying knives and get to those switches on the left and right.

Another fun snap of going flying after being attacked.

Videogame fire is always funny because it just sits there and burns; it never goes out, and it never spreads. Shouldn’t the entire building be consumed in flames by this point? I was playing Judgment the other day and there is a whole underground level where you are fighting in a building on fire. No one is worried about the building collapsing? The intense heat? Not even smoke inhalation?

Epic scene! For the end of this game we are treated to an amazing looking environment.

That’s quite some contortion going on for that kick.

I just love how he still has the funky hair even as a monster.

The ending leaves you on a bit of a cliffhanger, story-wise.

…but then it just explicitly tells you to get ready for a sequel. I hate seeing this in a game or movie; to me it shows both a lack and excess of confidence at the same time: the lack of confidence to treat that one release as a standalone piece of content, and the excess of confidence to announce a sequel at the ending of the first one.

Well, about 18 months after the release of Nightmare Creatures did indeed come Nightmare Creatures II. It takes place 100 years later, in 1934, and is reportedly very similar. I already purchased that one, and at only 5-7 hours total runtime, it should be a quick playthrough. Bring it on!