Jim’s Nightmare: Chapter 1 is a psychological horror pixel game that says you will go on a journey to uncover a mysterious shadowy figure hell-bent on killing you while battling a mental illness that blurs reality and nightmare.

Developed by Pumpkiny Games and published by Sky Dean Games, you play as ex-gangster Jim Hounds as you learn about his shady past, his mental illness, and his hunt for a shadowy madman. Well, at least that was the hope as not even after 30 minutes the game froze, when I restarted it the HUD window shrank so I could no longer interact with anything.

Since the HUD was now small it meant any working of the sliders was more of a guess on the screen and a hope that when you clicked it would do something.

The controls are simple point and click to move, hold down space to run, left-click interact and right-click to investigate. You use Q and E to open your perks menu or your inventory where you can use items or merge them to create new items.

Perks are meant to help you out during the game, one perk lets you run without losing stamina, but that is the only one that seems to work, as I have yet to discover what they actually do. Also, there is no controls menu or guide of any type to show you how it works, there are tutorial info boxes that pop up once and don’t really explain anything.

I managed to finally get out of the first area by un-installing the game and re-installing it only to then get to another area that was going well then when I found something I needed to fix, then found the tool that I needed to fix the object it was no longer interactable. After hours of exiting out and back in clicking on everything possible in the area, I called it quits, it had defeated me.

What made it worse though is the fact that it is pixelated, looking for things, especially small objects are hard to spot. The inspectable items like notes could be overlapped with other notes and items causing one of them to be permanently stuck in the middle of your screen, and the speech boxes and dialogue were so slow, especially now that I have had to play the same parts over and over, the only saving grace is that everything is voice acted even if the script could have used a second proofread.

This game needs some more time in the oven, it is interesting, and I think I would like this game if it were a lot more polished. But going pixeled was not the best option, especially for this game or maybe adding a few more pixels to clean the look up a bit. Like three or four diagonally connected tiny squares to make a rod is just weak, this needs an overhaul to be playable because, at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be.

Written by: Adam Brasher