Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 20211. Underworld Ascendant - PC2. Castlevania: Harmony of Despair - PS33. Ni no Kuni - PS34. Operencia: The Stolen Sun - PC5. RPM Racing - PC6. Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem - PC7. Pokemon Legends: Arceus - Switch8. Ni no Kuni II - PS49. Everspace - PC10. PowerSlave Exhumed - PC11. Horizon Forbidden West - PS512. Elden Ring - PS513. Shadow Warrior 3 - PC14. Ghostrunner: Project_Hel - PC15. Triangle Strategy - Switch16. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - PC17. Nightmare Reaper - PCNightmare Reaper is a retro-styled boomer shooter with a few roguelite elements. It has a huge amount of content and serves as a master class in how to evolve your gameplay and level design over the course of the game, along with having an interesting, unobtrusive, and optional story to go with your blowing shit up action.
When you kick off the game you start in a room of a mental hospital. The door is locked, so you have no choice but to go to sleep once you're done poking around your space. And when you do, the nightmares start. You are thrust into a world where everything is out to kill you, so the only solution is to murder them first. You'll grab a variety of weapons with randomly rolled bonuses, as well as treasure to build up your gold supply. But when you reach the exit you can only keep one weapon of basic quality, so choose wisely, as that will be your only friend in the next level. If you die or finish you wake up in the hospital again, except now there are pages from the journal of your doctor, one page per stage. And as you proceed you'll notice that sometimes someone leaves your door open, giving you a chance to poke around the hospital a bit more.
The game consists of three episodes of nine stages each, with each stage having three parts. A stage consists of a single aesthetic and a pool of rooms; these rooms are then randomized and stitched together to form the level. This seems mostly to serve the purpose of keeping things fresh for the player when they die, as you aren't forced to deal with a potentially bad combination of enemies (especially important if you decided to keep a sub-par weapon from the last level). Wiping out all the enemies in a room has a chance to spawn a random event, which can be positive or negative. There are always a few secret rooms to find full of treasure, as well as a challenge room where you need to engage in some sort of traversal to get to the end with a guaranteed weapon and some treasure. Upon completing the stage you are ranked in three areas; enemies killed, treasure found, and secrets found. Doing well in each will give you a bonus multiplier on your collected gold. And that gold is important, as it fuels your skill tree.
Well, I should say the first of three "trees". The primary skill tree is set up like the world map of SMB3. Each "stage" is a skill to unlock, and costs a certain amount of gold. Upon selecting you engage in a small platforming level; reaching the end gives you the skill. You only get charged the gold upon finishing the stage, so you can always bail out midway through (and deaths restart the screen, so no pressure). The unlocks are things like increased ammo supply, increased health, increased value of treasure, as well as some mobility upgrades like a dash and a double jump. But there's two other trees. One is a Pokemon knockoff that has two different kinds of boosts. The first is a series of small boosts that cost currency that is only earned by finishing levels (fixed amount each level) and doing certain achievements. This makes it similar to the paragon system of Diablo 3, and the intent is you only really engage with it in new game plus modes. The other is pills you can collect, which can be equipped while you're in the hospital. These give you various boosts, but on the flip side it also means that the game will roll some negative effects in the stage. So you might take a pill for increased gold and increased number of beneficial events, but the game will then have you take increased damage and enemies move faster. So it's a risk reward system. Finally, the third tree is for engaging in the arena, which is unlocked as you go through the game. Finishing waves of enemies gives you currency for this tree, and the tree is you playing a shmup. You scan various points on a space map, which has you shmup your way through enemies, and then you get the results; it might be a gate to a higher area, a pirate encounter for generating a decent amount of currency for the tree, or a station to buy upgrades. There are upgrades for the shmup mode and upgrades for you. Some of the personal upgrades are various extra moves or passive benefits, but others give you a little helper who floats around and does stuff. One attacks enemies, while another helps you find secrets.
Wow, that was a big systems dump. The rest is quicker to go through. The game has extremely smooth and frantic shooter gameplay. As mentioned, enemies and objects can drop weapons, which come in three tiers. In general, a higher tier weapon is better than a lower tier weapon, but then they also have quality levels, which determine the number of mods they can roll. Uncommon is one, rare is two, and legendary is three positive with a chance for a negative. Getting a good set of mods can really help out, like getting elemental damage to help manage enemy crowds, or getting a chance to steal health. Initially you can only keep tier one weapons, but midway through the skill tree you can keep tier two weapons, and at the end you unlock both keeping two weapons at a time and tier three weapons. You'll want to try different things out to find what fits your play style, but also be careful. Some weapons might be really good for a boss and really bad against regular enemies, so you can put yourself in a bad situation by keeping the wrong weapon. In that situation you'll have to persevere and hope to get a good random drop to put you back on track.
The game starts off fairly simple in terms of level design, but episode two adds a grapple hook and a lot more verticality, while episode three improves the grapple hook and introduces level geometry that consists of islands floating in a death plane. You can do some really fancy stuff with the grapple at this point. The various interactibles also increase in complexity as you move forward. But fortunately, the game is good about highlighting things needed for level progression and leaving the ones that just unlock secrets unadorned.
Overall it has a fantastic balance to the gameplay and is super satisfying to play. As mentioned, there is a ton of content available, and that's before you talk about the optional stuff like the arenas and NG+ (which keeps upgrades but amps up enemies to match). If you're a fan of the genre I can't recommend this one enough.
