Nightmares Within Nightmares

This is a Twine game where you have three dreams in order, over and over again, about dying.

Each dream is fairly brief, with 2-3 or 4 choices per dream. There are a lot of options, though, so it's hard to know what to do to be safe.

Fortunately, if you explore each dream enough, you find hints about the other dreams. Phrases that don't make sense at the time but later you look at options and go, 'Oh, I get it now!'.

Even after playing a couple of times, I didn't always understand why some things happened (like why the kitchen just kind of disappears or what triggers the ending for the final dream).

The writing is on-point and covers some frightening situations. I didn't feel sucked in emotionally, maybe because I was focused on the puzzle-aspects and felt safe as it was all a dream. But it was very descriptive.

Excellent work for a 4-hour game, and a neat way to do choice-based puzzles.

Ingenious time-loop puzzle box in which you whizz through a sequence of cyclical inter-linked nightmare scenarios trying to escape to wakefulness. A dense thicket of choices await you at each turn, as you seek the critical clues from one dream to help free yourself from another. Impressively captures that bewildering yet hyper-real feeling of free-association during a vivid dream to a tee.