Jim's Nightmare: Chapter 1 Steam Charts & Stats

I liked this one for the most part. Kudos for the voice acting. Brings the characters to life. The 2d style lends itself well to the atmosphere that the game has goin'. It's animated pretty well. It starts out rather calm as we wait for our lady to come home but then gets iffy of course. From there the horror section kicks in. It was fine till I ran into a lockpick puzzle which I'm not sure how it works. Early on I managed to get stuck on a particular puzzle but managed to figure it out which felt satisfying. The lockpick tho we shall see. Over all I'm lookin forward to seein' how it unfolds. Gameplay Impressions: https://youtu.be/d3uvkWLVLiU

Even though I do not recommend the game currently, it does have potential I just think the price is too high for what it currently has to offer. Also at the time of writing, there is only 1 chapter and that is what I am reviewing. Pixel Visuals and Sound are great, also the voice acting is quite decent for an indie title. I am not sure I love the avatar style, the proportions look a bit weird with bigger heads than body, giving it a cartoony look, compared to the otherwise rather grim atmosphere. Writing is probably currently the weakest point for me, while visuals and soundtrack deliver great atmosphere the actual dialogues seem very shallow and inconsistent. We are choosing a detective class and we are also praised by our friend for our investigative talents, but the back story of the character does not indicate any such talents whatsoever, so that just seems overall off. Also regarding the villain revealed close to the end of the chapter: [spoiler]the letter just seems childish, edgy. And why actually would our friend decide to burn the letter, if it was for J? It seems childish to think that it would make any problems disappear and on top of that our villain expected that to happen? (using it as a distraction and... for... just hitting him on the head after the letter was already delivered?)[/spoiler] Warning, spoilers in regards to puzzles are following: There is a lot of small inconsistencies/questionable interactions. Like the game plays in 2011 when everyone had cell phones, we are still going out of our way to fix an outlet to make a call via a landline? (while we are in the middle of the city) It makes it feel like the puzzle is just there for the sake of having another puzzle. How is a replacement window stored in a cylinder? And also who stores windows in a safe? Maybe the game is trying to be goofy with these, but overall the vibe seems to want to be serious. We witness a threat to our life and the life of the employee and argue for her to take a cab, which we will call for her. However we do not call a cab and we just leave her behind not waiting for her to be picked up. These are all individually small things, but for me they ended up being immersion breaking. There is ofc some minor bugs at this point and some ui improvements required (e,g. when choosing skills, you cannot see your current points), but this is obviously fine for a game in early access. Overall I felt like some stuff had just been put in place to prolong chapter 1, The nightmare episode also seemed extremely unbalanced, since there is no hint to your actual goal. I spent probably an hour trying to [spoiler] get to my hand and run back, until randomly fulfilling the probably "dodge often enough around the middle area" requirement [/spoiler], this is probably just an innocent oversight.