Nightmare Frontier wants you to live in fear. Not of its genre-mashing tactical-extraction-looter setup, but of the terrifying creatures that spawn from your characters’ fears. This is one collection of gameplay styles that feel as though they shouldn’t work together, but, in practice, this is a tight, thoughtful tactical game, that has you thinking multiple levels, rather than moves, ahead.
In Nightmare Frontier, you’re tasked with leading a team through a progressively tough series of missions, advancing through the 1900s-based fictional American city that the game is set in. Lead developer, Mateusz Pilski, tells me, “It’s basically infinite, but you have to plan ahead and make a decision when to extract your team, because you lose everything if you die.”
The route follows a branching path, with each step giving you a string of options to choose from. They’ll each tell you what kind of loot you might get, or what modifiers are active, or they might be a special location where you can partially heal up the more battered members of your team. Straightaway, you can see the risk and reward of your route selection, and before you’ve even set foot in a stage, there’s something to think about.
Those stages are tight and enclosed. Seemingly, this is to promote short, sharp battles, and also to provide tactical choices from the off, getting you straight into the action. It also allows you to utilise one of the most important aspects of Nightmare Frontier’s combat: collisions. Similar games like Marvel’s Midnight Suns, this is a tactical game that embraces impact, and factors it in.
What that means in practice is that a punch from your character will send an enemy sprawling back, and while you can move into their space to press their advantage, they’ll also take more damage from colliding with barrels, crates and other enemies that might lie in their path. If it’s another enemy then they’ll take damage as well.
You’ll really want to press that advantage too, as Nightmare Frontier rewards you with an additional action for every enemy you kill. This means that, in theory, your team could clear a stage in one go with careful planning and thought. These levels are as much of a puzzle as they are a tactical battlefield, and it works especially well to keep up the pace, and that frenzied feeling of being right on the edge.
Frenzy extends into the gameplay itself as well. As you progress further into the city, the Nightmare level rises, and the enemies will get progressively tougher the longer you stay in this horrific place. They’ll gain additional boons, like entering a frenzied, more powerful state, until they’re even more terrifying than they were to start with.
As the enemies are drawn from the character’s nightmares, they’re an undeniably horrible bunch. Our playthrough saw us facing off against the terrifying Wendigo, an avenging, deer-headed, antlered spirit. These huge enemies were more than capable of wasting our team in moments, and I relied on the fact that you can reverse every decision you’ve made in a stage to retry my strategy multiple times. Wraiths and other supernatural creatures also lie waiting for you in the shadows of each level, and for the foolhardy, your run is likely to come to a swift end.
You’ll need your loot, though. Through each run you can collect and equip different weaponry and items to help increase your chances of success, hoping to get out with everything you’ve collected, rather than leaving it behind with the beaten remains of your team. Here, during our hands-on, it already feels great, and I can see it becoming something of an obsession as it reaches completion.
Visually, Nightmare Frontiers is doing absolutely everything right. Its terrifying, horrific beasts are suitably gruesome and showcase a clear sense of purpose and vision, while the downtrodden remains of a 1900s town, provide a fitting, if overly brown, locale for the tactical battles to play out.
Nightmare Frontiers has immediately made its way into my wishlist, with its unexpected mix of genres proving tantalising in action. If you fancy trying it out for yourself, there’s a demo that’s just become available on Steam that gives you a taste of the looter strategy extraction genre before the game enters Early Access sometime this month.