The Nightmare from Beyond | First Impressions

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The Domaginarium describe their third-person horror platformer as (old) Tomb Raider meeting Lovecraft, in space - a pitch we found difficult to resist. With The Nightmare from Beyond’s final release slated for Q3 2018, the current Steam Early Access build is far from content complete, but does it seem poised to deliver on the promising concept?

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by Sam Sant

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@SlamShotSam

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Having launched in the earliest of access in order to draw feedback from the playerbase, there’s a lot you’ll need to let slide for the moment. The lack of controller support and voice acting, along with the underwhelming stock sound effects, can make it difficult to settle in and be immersed, but they’re all set to be put straight.

There are a bevy of more galling omissions and issues however, like the lack of a tutorial and item descriptions, a missing brightness setting (it’s easy to miss things in the darkness), inconsistent jumps, dodgy animations and detection, and a tendency for protagonist, Sanja, to fall through or get stuck on geometry.

A lot of the quirks are fairly consistent, meaning once you’ve identified and accounted for them in order to avoid replication, the game’s playable even at this stage. That said, if you’re not up for a bit of playtesting, climbing aboard definitely isn’t something we’d recommend for the moment. Just don't let that put you off entirely; The Nightmare from Beyond was painless to get up and running and already boasts a smooth frame rate, which is more than can be said for some finished products on Steam. 

The Domaginarium describe their third-person horror platformer as (old) Tomb Raider meeting Lovecraft, in space - a pitch we found difficult to resist. 

As Sanja, a young D’nyg woman in search of her sister, Dajana, you’ll traverse environments that seamlessly shift from stoney fantasy to techy sci-fi. While starting out linear, things open up to reveal some solid, looping level design that’s complimented by platforming and light puzzle solving elements straight out of a classic Tomb Raider game (as promised).

​The disparate-yet-connected world, which houses interesting architecture and artefacts that make it enticing in the absence of impressive graphics, definitely has us curious to explore more in the hope of uncovering how exactly the scattered sections came to coexist. It serves as much more a driving force than the beginnings of the bland story, which isn’t helped by a reliance on nonsense fantasy terms that haven’t yet been explained.

​As a D’yng, you're marked with tribal patterns that emit a neon glow, dimly lighting your way through the bleak nightmarescape. When you encounter the mysterious creatures within, you’ll need to hold your breath to extinguish the light and sneak past them, avoiding a swift and inevitable death. ​​

The one creature you directly encounter can’t be combated - though you do get some bombs used to open a shortcut later on, so it’s possible you might eventually be able to put these to use - and is obscured by a black smog to preserve an air of mystery, with otherwise indirect encounters seeing you relentlessly pursued or your ankles snapped at from an off-screen presence to push you through platforming sections at pace. What you don't see is often more unnerving than what you do, and that's the case here.

The disparate-yet-connected world has us curious to delve deeper, serving as much more a driving force than the beginnings of the bland story,

If you're caught, you’ll need to go back to the last manual save point. These are fairly frequent, so you’ll never lose too much progress, and help to highlight the game’s '90s inspirations by feeling very Resident Evil.

Weighing in at around two flawed hours, what we essentially have at the moment is a paid proof of concept demo. As a result, we’d recommend waiting to see how The Nightmare from Beyond develops before laying down your hard earned, especially considering the price isn’t set to increase once the game leaves Early Access. There’s reason to remain optimistic in the interim however; The Domaginarium have put in a decent first showing and hold both a commitment to frequent updates and a development roadmap that looks set to iron out the acknowledged issues.

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The Nightmare from Beyond is scheduled for release in Q3 2018 on PC, PS4 and PS Vita. It’ll set you back £14.99 or your regional equivalent.