Nightmare Planet 2025

I died exactly 27 times over the course of 3 days of playing this game. Took around 5 hours.

This game should NOT take you 5 hours. An hour, max. Because there's a save function. But, I didn't know that till my 23rd death.

So, I basically played this like a Souls game, starting from the beginning every time I died. At the end, I was playing almost out of spite just to finish the game.

I could have saved all that headache by just typing help. This tells you that to save the game, you have to type save game, instead of just save like I was doing. Now, the game doesn't ever tell you about help, but I guess it supposes some experience on your part with playing parser-IFs. I barely have any.

About the story itself, it's nothing special. Whatever's on the blurb isn't really expanded on in-game. Princess Aurora is actually a douche who enjoys the attention. The writing's simple.

The gameplay is even simpler. The puzzles begin quite easy, and slowly get more unintuitive as you go along. But, that's because I didn't type help, cause if you do type help, you'll get common verbs and what the parser expects, i.e. how to actually play the game.

I wouldn't have drowned 5 more times in (Spoiler - click to show)quicksand if I just wrote (Spoiler - click to show)throw rope on stump instead of (Spoiler - click to show)tie rope on stump, tie rope with stump, tether rope to stump, use rope with stump, grab stump with rope, because the help text clearly does not have tether, tie or grab on the common verbs list.

The game feels cosy. Like a comfort game. Something you play as a kid and come back to years later. I would definitely play this as a little kid.

The default UI is amazing. Coming from Gargoyle, that thing looks like a notepad file on the default. I never bothered to tinker with the settings, so judging from first impressions, this looks way better, and probably why I was able to stick with it for so long.

This seems like more of a big deal than just a porting of a game. Here's the author's Reddit post on it: Nightmare Planet 2025 by Candy64

Looks like they made a 'system' for porting C64 games to web. I have no clue about the C64 but I want to make a game with this.

Also, I would love to play the original game. The author mentioned slight changes.

Bugs? Yeah, a few, occasional inventory glitches, I think. Like, sometimes it says my inv is full but I move around/reload the game and try again, and it lets me pick stuff up, and small things like that. Makes it better, in my opinion.