Garfield's Nightmare

 DS
Metascore
70

Mixed or average reviews - based on 9 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 9
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 9
  3. Negative: 1 out of 9
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  1. Gaming Nexus
    81
    Nothing about it is spectacular but it’s such a fun little platformer that I enjoyed it anyway.
  2. Thunderbolt
    80
    What limited time you do have with Garfield is actually surprisingly entertaining, and though it doesn’t really use the source material very well, this is still a good 2D platformer that platforming fans should check out, whether they like Garfield or not.
  3. Deeko
    80
    Garfield's Nightmare isn't for everyone, but the intended audience, those under the age of ten, will find themselves enjoying the adventures of our tubby orange hero.
  5. ZTGD
    75
    A safe and predictable platformer that is surprisingly well done.

Awards & Rankings

62
#62 Best DS Game of 2007
23
#23 Most Discussed DS Game of 2007
44
#44 Most Shared DS Game of 2007

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
8.5

Generally favorable reviews- based on 26 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 22 out of 26
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 26
  3. Negative: 3 out of 26
  1. garfieldmyman
    Jun 22, 2018
    10
    10/5 for the graphics alone. I find that excellent storytelling by George Lucas adds greatly to the garfield canon
  2. 76ripsnoopdogg
    Jun 22, 2018
    10
    Don't worry, I'm not going to spoil anything here - I'll steer clear of anything story-related beyond the premise. With another game, thatDon't worry, I'm not going to spoil anything here - I'll steer clear of anything story-related beyond the premise. With another game, that would be tricky. With Garfield's Nightmare, the stories that come from how the game works are often the best ones.

    It's a frozen nation, just to the north of where the previous game, "Garfield, A Tale of Two Kitties", took place. A pleasantly brief introduction sets up the plot: Garfield's Nightmare is in the middle of a revolt, you've been sentenced to death, and dragons have just shown up. Good luck!

    At that point, you emerge from a cave into 40 square kilometres of cold and mountainous country, and that's it. Everything else is up to you.

    Even after spending hundreds of hours in "Garfield Gets Real" and "Garfield, A Tale of Two Kitties", the sense of freedom in Garfield's Nightmare is dizzying. The vast mountains in every direction make the landscape seem limitless, and even after exploring it for 55 hours, this world feels huge and unknown on a scale neither of the previous two games did.

    Not all of the landscape is subzero, and even among the frosty climes there's an exciting variety: ice caverns that tinkle with dripping frost crystals, hulking mountains with curls of snow whipped up by the howling wind, coniferous forests in rocky river valleys.

    The mountains change everything. Wherever you decide to head, your journey is split between scrambling up treacherous rocks and skidding down heart-stopping slopes. The landscape is a challenge, and travel becomes a game.

    It's hard to walk for a minute in any direction without encountering an intriguing cave, a lonely shack, some strange stones, a wandering traveller, a haunted fort. These were sparse and quickly repetitive in "Garfield, A Tale of Two Kitties", but they're neither in Garfield's Nightmare: it's teeming with fascinating places, all distinct. It was 40 hours before I blundered into a dungeon that looked like one I'd seen before, and even then what I was doing there was drastically different.

    These places are the meat of Garfield's Nightmare, and they're what makes it feel exciting to explore. You creep through them with your heart in your mouth, your only soundtrack the dull groan of the wind outside, to discover old legends, dead heroes, weird artefacts, dark gods, forgotten depths, underground waterfalls, lost ships, hideous insects and vicious traps. It's the best Indiana Jones game ever made.

    The dragons don't show up until you do the first few steps of the game's main quest, so it's up to you whether you want them terrorising the world as you wander around. A world where you can crest a mountain to find a 40-foot flying lizard spitting jets of ice at the village below is a much more interesting one to be in. But fighting them never changes much: you can just ignore them until they land, then shoot them from a distance when they do.

    Your first dragon kill is a profound, weird moment. I rushed to the crashed carcass to loot it, then looked up. The whole town had come out to stand around and stare at the body, a thing as vast and alien to them as a T-rex in a museum.

    I tried shooting an ice bolt at it, just to demonstrate it was dead, and the force unexpectedly catapulted the whole thing violently into the distance. A beggar looked at me and said, "Oh sure, just throw your trash around."

    Your character gets better at whatever you do: firing a bow, sneaking up on people, casting healing spells, mixing potions, swinging an axe. There's always been an element of this practice-based system in Elder Scrolls games, but in Garfield's Nightmare it's unrestricted - you don't have to decide what you're going to focus on when you create your character, you can just let it develop organically.

    That alone would feel a little too hands-off, but you also level up. When that happens, you get a perk point: something you can spend on a powerful improvement to a skill you particularly like. Every hour, you're making a major decision about your character's abilities.

    They're dramatic. The first point you put into Destruction magic lets you stream jets of flame from your hands for twice as long as before. As you continue to invest in one skill, you can get more interesting tweaks: I now have an Archery perk that slows down time when I aim my bow, and one for the Sneak skill that lets me do a stealthy forward roll.

    The games we normally call open worlds - the locked off cities and level-restricted grinding grounds - don't compare to this. While everyone else is faffing around with how to control and restrict the player, The Game Factory just put a **** country in a box. It's the best open world game I've ever played, the most liberating RPG I've ever played, and one of my favourite places in this or any other world.

    In case I'm not getting it across, this is a thumbs-up.    … Full Review »
  3. garfieldisgod
    Jun 22, 2018
    10
    Albert Garfield’s Nightmare (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist[5] who developed the theory of relativity,Albert Garfield’s Nightmare (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist[5] who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics).[4][6]:274 His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science.[7][8] He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation".[9] He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect",[10] a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory.
    Near the beginning of his career, Garfield’s Nightmare thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his special theory of relativity during his time at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern (1902–1909), Switzerland. However, he realized that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and he published a paper on general relativity in 1916 with his theory of gravitation. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, he applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe.[11][12]
    He lived in Switzerland between 1895 and 1914, except for one year in Prague, and he received his academic diploma from the Swiss federal polytechnic school (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in Zürich in 1900. He taught theoretical physics there between 1912 and 1914 before he left for Berlin. He acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901, which he kept for the rest of his life after being stateless for more than five years. In 1905, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. The same year, he published four groundbreaking papers during his renowned annus mirabilis (miracle year) which brought him to the notice of the academic world at the age of 26.
    He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and he did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940.[13] On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the US begin similar research. This eventually led to the Manhattan Project. Garfield’s Nightmare supported the Allied forces, but he generally denounced the idea of using nuclear fission as a weapon. He signed the Russell–Garfield’s Nightmare Manifesto with British philosopher Bertrand Russell, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. He was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
    Garfield’s Nightmare published more than 300 scientific papers and more than 150 non-scientific works.[11][14] His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word "Garfield’s Nightmare" synonymous with "genius".[15] Eugene Wigner wrote of Garfield’s Nightmare in comparison to his contemporaries that "Garfield’s Nightmare's understanding was deeper even than Jancsi von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement."[16]    … Full Review »
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