Nightmare Creatures

About Nightmare Creatures

Nightmare Creatures (1997) is Kalisto's gothic action-horror game in which a priest or an immunologist's daughter fights monsters through an occult-plagued 1834 London.

Nightmare Creatures in Depth

In 1666 the devil-worshipping Brotherhood of Hecate experimented in London to create an elixir granting superhuman powers, but produced grotesque monsters instead; when they planned to use them as an army, member Samuel Pepys set their headquarters alight, causing the Great Fire of London. In 1834 London is again beset by evil: monsters are sighted, people mutate, and the dead rise, all part of the schemes of Adam Crowley, a mad scientist and occultist based on Aleister Crowley, aided by the Brotherhood. When Pepys's lost diary reaches priest and occult expert Ignatius Blackward, he sends it to New Orleans immunologist Dr. Jean Franciscus, who is killed and the book stolen. At the funeral, Ignatius and Jean's daughter Nadia receive a note pointing them to Crowley.

The single-player game lets players control Ignatius or Nadia. Besides each character's main weapon, they can use secondary weapons such as pistols, mines, fire bombs and magic spells. An adrenaline bar drains health when it runs out, so players must keep seeking out and winning fights to keep it full. The environments were modelled on 19th-century maps and blueprints. Critics almost uniformly praised its spooky atmosphere and monster designs but noted control problems and an occasionally frustrating camera, and they were split on whether the repetitive fighting outweighed its strengths.

Making Nightmare Creatures

Kalisto Entertainment developed it for PlayStation, Windows and Nintendo 64, and bidding for the publishing rights was reportedly fierce. Activision released it in North America, promoting the PlayStation version with a TV advert voiced by Maurice LaMarche. It was a commercial hit, selling over 1.5 million copies by January 2000. The PlayStation version received favourable reviews and the Nintendo 64 and PC versions mixed ones. Next Generation wrote that "while the visuals are compelling enough to drive many players forward, the repetitive action is enough to make most wait for a level select code and a weekend rental". Nightmare Creatures II followed three years later, while a third game was cancelled in 2004.