Nightmare of Decay

It’s a real shame that the two halves of gameplay, the action and the puzzling/exploration, differ so greatly in quality or this would be an easy recommendation to any 90s nostalgia-hunters. Instead there’s a clear divide and the fun often comes crashing to a halt, constraining the player to slowly back up and work a row of dawdling dummies with a pipe for five minutes to conserve resources. To make it worse there are actually two extra modes, a classic wave-based survival challenge with a shop between each round and a procedurally generated labyrinth, that both rely on this exact approach to play: aggro the mass of dopes and painstakingly beat them to death with a melee weapon in order to save any important armaments for the real problems. I still say it’s worth giving a shot if you’re into this style of retro horror, more so because of how exceptionally cheap it is, as long as you’re aware of the few clumsy design choices that all too often get in the way of the experience.