Well… At least so far.
Gripping Racing Action With (Completely Generic) Spooky Racers
Nightmare Kart dropped June of this year, being a rebrand of a previous fan project called “Bloodborne Kart”. You can pick it up on Steam for ABSOLUTELY FREE. That’s right. Its Free. And it’s awesome to boot.
Nightmare Kart’s story was a little all over the place for me, but honestly I was sticking around for the music and the kart racing. This game utilizes a ton of the best mechanics from the kart racers of yesteryear. Drifting, items, stylish jumps, Crash Team racing style boss fights, and arena combat. It took me approximately five hours and one frozen pizza to beat this game, and it was blast.
Strange Racers in a Strange Course
The cast of characters in this game is as odd as any FromSoft offering. Many of your competing racers act as boss fights, and you aquire a cast of unusual foes by the time you reach the final area. Your own racer has a couple options for karts or motorcycles, as well as a melee weapon. The game is pretty easy and doesn’t require a lot of thought when it comes to designing your racer.
You start out with a nice tutorial level that explains the main mechanics (of which there are many). While the game has a lot going on in terms of powerups, enemies, and kart mechanics, none of the mechanics will be new for experienced kart racers. After a few minutes, I was ready to go.
Level Design
Nightmare Kart starts out with pretty standard levels. Most of the first levels lack verticality,, and feature one or two jumps. Then, out of nowhere, you start climbing towers and launching off of huge rampps. Further levels of this game feature some amazing set pieces. I don’t want to spoil them though, the game is short and easy enough that most players should have no problem getting to the latter levels.
Musical Menagerie
Nightmare Kart has an amazing soundtrack that constantly moves between classically themed horror music in grandiose minor keys, to 8 bit crushed kart racing music. I loved the way the music would swing back and forth between themes, and it definitely added to the action
PSX Pipeline Rendering
The graphics in this game are a great example of what the indie community can accomplish when it wants to mimic a style. This game looks very much like a PSOne title, albeit with a much higher texture size and screen resolution.
That being said, the graphical style was at times hard to look at, and I occasionally drove the wrong way because I couldn’t tell which dark brown pixel smudge was the road. If you just consider it as part of the challenge, it’s no problem at all.
Final Thoughts
Download this game. It’s free. Support the creator, they did a great job. Here is their itch page if you want to donate