Nightmare Descent
Nightmare Descent is an eldritch horror card game where the only way out is to wake up. Trapped in a surreal dream beneath reality, players must descend through shifting layers of madness. Every level takes you deeper into an unknowable abyss, where unspeakable horrors await.
Choose your path—face terrifying entities head-on with dwindling resources, or flee deeper into the unknown, hoping to survive just long enough to wake up. If you’re lucky—or cursed—you may awaken and escape. But every decision chips away at your sanity.
Will you reach the lowest depths of your dreams, confront them and wake up,
Or will the Nightmare claim you?
Contains 19 imaginative cards and 12 scary enemies!
Controls:
Hold Left-Click and drag a card to one of the 4 slots to select the corresponding ability on the card.
Hold Right-Click to inspect cards and learn about their abilities.
Left-Click the "Imagine" button to activate all selected abilities.
Known Bugs:
-Playing too fast might crash the game. Avoid messing with slots while the end of turn sequence is happening
-"Dream Eater" Meditate action does -2 damage instead of 2 damage it is supposed to do
Credits :
DrSmey - Programming, Design
Penta - Art, Design
Noctiluca - Art, Design
Tyrrer - Audio, Design
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Comments
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Didn't quite understand what was going on in my first run, but managed to wake up (thrice) in the second. Should've looked at the known bugs since I was definitely trying to play really fast and some of the cards went haywire haha.
The design of the game is quite elegant, although there seems to be one clear dominant strategy. I had fun with it. One small suggestion would be to indicate that the player can't wake up just by the depth, because I tried rushing that and it kept saying "Can't Wake Up" and no explanation why.
The art pieces of the cards and enemies is really cool, was enjoying looking forward to what kind of a monster shows up next! I think some interface adjustments would help showcase the art better and also explain the game nicely.
There are a few mechanics that are pretty under-explained, but that just was necessary because of the time constraint. We finished working on this less than 10 mins before the deadline.
Luckily, the game is still pretty playable even if you don't quite understand every interaction.
yoo I loved the plot twist at the end, actual nightmare horror /jk
I loved it, the theme, the ambience, and the gameplay is fun. It need some balancing (card games are pretty hard to balance, ik), and maybe a better explanation of what the "icon - icon" cards do. Oh, and a way to see all the hand when I have too many cards (unless you intend a hand limit). Overall it's a pretty solid game, nice work!
Balancing and hand management and also incomplete explanations are for sure the most obvious issues that are still in the game. They also take a lot of time to test and implement, so we had to make some compromises.
As a short explanation of the "A = B" cards: It basically means get "A scaling with amount of B". For example, Adrenalin Rush does 1 damage at 50 Heartbeat and 4 above 125 Heartbeat.
Interesting concept and good execution overall. The UI is mostly self-explanatory, which is nice.
I also liked the music, it fits well and doesn't feel repetitive too.
It could need some balancing though, all fights before the final one are pretty easy, and you can simply walk away from them too (is this intended?).
You can also overfill your hand, which makes the final fight very trivial.
Balancing is the aspect of the game that was left for the very end of our time limit, so in result the game is not that balanced.
Yes, fleeing is intended. It gives no new cards, while actually defeating an enemy is often a big source of new ones and is supposed to take more effort and risk.
It's also very easy to farm early enemies for cards, overfill the hand and never run out of resources after. We thought about a couple ways to fix this.
Either there could be a time penalty that prevents this, so the longer you take for your descent, the harder the game gets. Otherwise, we could always just find a way to implement a hand limit.