Mary Skelter: Nightmares Reviews

Amber red go brrrr

Mary Skelter Nightmare is a First Person Dungeon Crawling JRPG ala the style of Wizardry and Etrain Odyssey. Its uniqueness is derived from a focus on storytelling and the blood mechanic. You play as Jack, the leader of a group of Blood Maidens, girls who are fairy tale personified and made to travel a jail with various zones to try and escape into the real world. Unlike the other games of its genre, the party members you get are determined, each comes with different stats and different classes that they can change into as well as new traversal abilities that allows the player to go into new areas in the map. The mechanic that is unique to this game is blood. As your party fights and kill enemies, they are soaked in their blood, which, when a member is fully drenched they then entered the massacre mode where they become stronger and gained access to very strong and very low cost abilities. But players have to be mindful, as the party members, once hit or witnessed other members getting knocked out can develop combat stresses which will put them into an uncontrollable state once they are fully drenched instead of the massacre mode, giving them super high attack boost but the downside being they can randomly maul themselves or their own party members. The story is competent. Predictable JRPG tropes that does nothing new, but is not entirely offensive. The gameplay is fun, not as tight as Etrain Odyssey but the mechanics does make the game and the stress management fun. I would have recommended this game, but the issue is the crashes. The game have a memory problem, and if you play for longer than a set amount of time, the game will crash. And looking at the age of this game, this is definitely not getting fixed. Which is a shame. It's a decent game that is severely let down by a poor port to PC.

Ngl, the gameplay, just like your average dungeon crawler. The added mechanics give a fair bit of flavor to the game and its sequels but besides Jack mitigating and controlling the flow between Massacre Mode and Blood Skelter the gameplay is not that much different from any other dungeon crawler. What is different is the aesthetic, the atmosphere, and the characterization. The problem with other dungeon crawlers is often the lack of chaacterization from your companions, which the characters being preset there's not a ton of customization but the job changes help switch things up and keeps your characters evolving. Your surroundings also differ from other dungeon crawlers. Where most in the medium immerse you in a medieval fantasy world, this one immerses you in a dark fantasy between Grimm's fairytales and an edge like stepping into a mid-2000s Hot Topic. This one stands out from the others. There's some lewd moments and mechanics but it's not any more egregious than other Japanese DCs. I think this entry is absolutely worth your time if you are a fan of dungeon crawlers and you need a new flavor from your Etrian Odysseys, your Wizardry titles, your Demon Gaze, etc. Out of all of them this series offers a different flavor of experience in dungeon crawlers and for that alone I think it's worth a shot from fellow fans of the genre. Thanks for the read and hope you have as much fun as I am getting out of this.