Producer: Cascade Games
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: Rod Ashley

Each persons subconscious stores primeval memories which seep into our dreams. Frightmare dares the player to step into this psychic abyss and surrender to fears in the landscape of their darkest imaginings.

The nightmare takes place over a period of eight and a half hours in the supernatural environment of four dream zones, travelling through a surreal world of ruined, crumbling statues, networks of skeleton trees and rooms of blood-red skulls. In true dream fashion the ability to jump is weirdly enhanced - death by falling is a strange impossibility.

This dreamscape is haunted by the victims of five ancestral tales and legends. Contact with any one of them means the loss of one of the dreamer's five lives. Ranging from zombies to scarlet disembodied hands, these can be countered by a series of collectable weapons. Holy water kills all monsters instantly; revolvers (for which you also need to collect bullets), crucifixes and random potions have a more selective effect. Other icons increase your ability to jump, represent extra lives, and allow you to warp to different rooms.

As the inner self is penetrated, the dream state, recorded in letters at the top of the screen, alter accordingly. Beginning with a 'bad dream' the state slowly advances to finally become a 'nefarious frightmare'. After that all you have to do is wake up.

Each new room visited moves the clock on by six minutes; at 8.12 am the frightmare is over and the harrowed dreamer awakes.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Sinclair
Graphics: badly drawn and crudely animated
Sound: poor spot effects

I didn't know that my darkest dreams were full of badly drawn characters, colour clash and irritating gameplay, but that's what the Frightmare adverts say, so it must be true! The best thing about Frightmare is the inlay, full of ghostly descriptions of the inhabitants of the frightmare itself. The game itself is the pits. The animated ghosties flicker all the time and none of them look remotely scary. Many of the screens are similar and range from bare to bland. The best graphics in the game are on the title screen with the word 'Frightmare' scrawled across the top. If you are looking for a ghosty game then this isn't the one for you. The now aging Ghosts 'n' Goblins is far ahead of this.
NICK

Like a recurring dream, the promotion of Frightmare has been haunting the magazines with monotonous regularity for months. Unfortunately, the realisation is never as good as the dream. Nevertheless, Frightmare is entertaining enough. The macabre graphics create a fittingly ghoulish atmosphere and even the control method - somewhere between jumping and floating - is expressive of the surreal ambience. The real nightmare, however, is the price. As a platform arcade adventure it's hardly a pioneering breed. Unremarkable spot effects, messy collision detection and slightly clumsy controls mean that it doesn't even rank as one of the best of its type. Frightmare can get very addictive, but £9.95 is a high price to pay for some fairly standard fare.
KATI

Thank goodness my worst nightmares aren't half as creepy as the guys in this game! Graphically, Frightmare is pretty good. Of particular note is the loading screen picture, based on the cassette inlay. The in-game graphics are also quite good, with some rather nasty looking adversaries to be either killed or avoided. Although the game is initially playable, with a very athletic hero bouncing around the screen, I soon discovered that it was little more than a 'run around collecting enough objects to continue through to the next, even more bizarre part of the nightmare' type of game. Although quite chilling at first, sadly I found that tedium soon sets in.
MARK

Cascade
£9.95
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

If all games were presented as nicely as this one we'd... er, it would... um, well, they'd be a darned sight more interesting to look at! Frightmare is all dressed up in some great artwork, with a large instruction leaflet, cum poster, a trendy character set and a reasonably atmospheric tune.

Even the boring, irrelevant blurb isn't too boring and irrelevant. According to Cascade, deep at the back of your subconcious lie Frightmares, figments of the darker side of your imagination which, with the help of ten quid's worth of computer software, will escape from behind their thin veil of reason. They will appear to you in your dreams and imprison you...

Oh, enough of this trash. This is a game, not to be taken seriously. Anyway, I'm scared.

Having been trapped by these nasty dreams, the obvious thing to do is escape, of course, by waking up (although if you've ever tried waking yourself up in the middle of a nightmare you'll know how tricky it can be). Tipping a bucket of cold water over yourself is out for a start, so you're going to have to do it by advancing the clock to 8.12am - wakey, wakey time.

This is done by exploring every room, sorry, dream, in the game, each one adding six minutes to the clock. Points are scored by shooting the assorted ghouls and vampires etc, you'll find knocking around the innermost recesses of your cranium, which will increase your "dream state" to a higher level.

Essentially, what it all boils down to in a nutshell, is a platform game. Horrific, but true. It's heavily camouflaged with some well-designed graphics, but after years of training I can pick out a Willy clone at a hundred paces! You are represented by a little bloke who jumps around the screen, leaping around rotting corpses, dodging monsters and collecting objects. Huh!

And sadly, like most unoriginal game concepts, even the most original of plots can't make it any more fun to play. It isn't even particularly scarey, (although perhaps that would be asking a bit much of our flexible friend). P'raps they should have shoved in a few members of the EastEnders cast, or even a couple of digitised Gateway check-out girls. Now that would have made your hair stand on end!

Another unfortunate case of "Here's a good plot! Now let's base a game around it!" I've seen scarier things on "The Flumps"!

Label: Cascade
Author: Rod Ashley
Price: £9.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

The longer you dream, the worse it gets... no. It's not an SU editorial lunch, it's Frightmare, Cascade's latest bid to disprove the, "one-game company," tag.

Since the success of A.C.E. and A.C.E.2, Cascade has decided to adopt a higher profile and bring out a wide variety of games titles. I'm not sure if Frightmare is the best game to start with though, 'cos, let's face it, guys, it's basically a cross between a platforms-and-ladders game and Ghosts 'n' Goblins. And the big question is: Can you make it through from 12 midnight to 8.30, surviving assaults from the deepest darkest demons of your subconscious, without going bonkers?

There are four dream zones to play through (each with many screens) ) and each time you enter a new screen, the clock ticks off an extra a six minutes. The screens, consisting of the usual platforms, pillars, ruined buildings and plants, are haunted by all the mythical ghoulies of legend and history; vampires, werewolves, medusas, severed hands, zombies, mummies and swamp things. Of course, hidden throughout the screens are weapons which can be used to kill off various monsters; holy water kills practically anything; watches slow them down; crucifixes freeze zombies, demons, serpents and various other offspring of evil; and many of the less powerful monsters are vulnerable to ordinary bullets shot from the revolver. If you find another revolver, it doubles your rate of fire.

There's also a single silver revolver, which is the only weapon which will destroy zombies, werewolves, and Satan. Well it would wouldn't it? You can collect several weapons, and switch between them using the inventory at the bottom of the screen.

As you leap around the screens, other icons will also help you out; rings give an extra life, wings increase the size of your jumps, a transporter moves you across the screen, and a chalice increases your dream state rating. This rating varies from BAD DREAM to NEFARIOUS FRIGHTMARE (which is the height of scariness). The pairs of nouns and adjectives change as you score more points by shooting monsters, picking chalices and using weapons.

Now you might have noticed that this isn't the most exciting review in this month's issue, or indeed for several months' issues. The reason for this being that it's always difficult to whip up any enthusiasm for a game which is perfectly competently programmed, has pretty graphics and lots of gameplay, but not one jot of originality and no outstanding gimmicks. The most frightening thing about Frightmare is the price; it's certainly way better than the average budget game, but for £9.99 I certainly expect at least originality, excitement and, dare I say it? Superlative quality. Frightmare, sad to say, doesn't have it.

Cascade get traumatised.

What can you expect from a program endorsed by Grot Bags the Witch, you might ask yourself - a boring old platform game full of timing problems? Well that's what you get here alright, plus a few other niggles as well. Collectable weapons, extra jumps and the like are all very well, but half of them are practically useless while the other half are so vital you might as well give up if you waste one of them. The supposedly nightmarish graphics are really rather dull and the sprites seriously lacking in colour, leaving the program as a whole somewhat below the standard you'd expect of a two-quid game.

Reviewer: Andy Wilton

RELEASE BOX
C64/128, £9.95cs, £14.95dk, Out Now
Spec, £9.95cs, £14.95dk, Out Now
Ams, £9.95cs, £14.95dk, Imminent
IBM PC, £19.95dk

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 40/100
1 hour: 40/100
1 day: 30/100
1 week: 30/100
1 month: 20/100
1 year: 10/100