One day, you receive a letter from your mother, entreating you to return to your hometown. In a manual that is nearly lost to history, it is explained that you are a vicar’s son who moved away from the tiny village of Tynham Cross in order to pursue careers that don’t involve making barrels or filling barrels. I’m not playing these for the blog, since they’re dungeon crawls and you can’t make me. Known for her devastating cleavage and Valley Girl affect, Elvira follows in the footsteps of such late night luminaries as Vampira and Ghoulardi.Įlvira is featured prominently on the title screen of Personal Nightmare, and Horrorsoft published two Elvira RPGs shortly after Personal Nightmare. I may even remove it from the list entirely if my attempts to play it are as fruitless as this.īefore moving on to Personal Nightmare itself, it’s incumbent upon me to mention that Horror Soft hitched its wagon to the shooting star that was Elvira, the Mistress of the Dark ( nee Cassandra Peterson), hostess of the B-movie clearing house Movie Macabre from the early ’80’s. This, of course, meant using the extra pixels to represent more faithful and accurate gore.Īnother Horror Soft game, Waxworks, shows up a little bit later on the list, and I’m dreading it already. A sub-label of Adventure Soft Ltd., Horror Soft was a venue for adventure games that could take advantage of the graphical capabilities of modern Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS machines. Personal Nightmare was published by Horror Soft Ltd. But Personal Nightmare maybe wasn’t meant to be beaten or understood, and I’d rather write about a game than repeatedly be devoured by ghouls in a fruitless attempt to complete it. Anyone who has heard me obsess over The List can attest to my desire to be thorough. Ideally, the Hex Crank experiment will result in an assembly of Complete Survival Horror Experience. Even if it did indeed take half a lifetime.This is an uncomfortable precedent to set. But having said that… I am glad I finished it. This game will test you to your limits even with a walkthrough, and if you had a fear of death prior to playing this game you most certainly wont afterwards, as you will die so many times in so many different ways that by the end you'll have probably just about come to the end of your life/death cycle and reached nirvana itself. They eased up in later versions making it so you only got garrotted once every five minutes or so as opposed to say, two, but even that did little to help matters. The one thing holding this back from being a classic for me is the game's level of difficulty. The game boasts impressive, digitised graphics (taken from a real nearby village), realistic animation and digitised sound, and when combined with an active, timed world creates a genuinely creepy atmosphere hitherto not experienced in adventures. A classic adventure at heart, the game can be played by either keyboard or mouse, or both, and gameplay consists of exploring the village, gathering items to utilise or collect as evidence, and interrogating residents for hints. Initially entitled "Elvira's HorrorSoft: A Personal Nightmare", the game itself actually had very little to do with her, and later versions were sold simply as "Personal Nightmare". Heady stuff indeed for 1989! This was one game I found so intriguing that I decided I would finish it even if it took me 20 years. Your must defeat the power of the devil by identifying to the local constabulary evidence of crimes committed by residents already affected and have them arrested, and rid the village of your birthright of total demonic oppression as well as locate the whereabouts of your missing parents. Your father, the local vicar, has mysteriously disappeared and your mother has sent you a letter out of the blue inviting you to stay the weekend, but she too is strangely not to be found. The storyline was a cracker : A sleepy little village is gradually being taken over by the devil himself via means of possession and utilising those already possessed to find innocents to sacrifice at midnight rituals, or flat out kill in pretty much any manner fancied.
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