Nightmare Frames review: a Hollywood horror point-and-click adventure

I spend an hour playing Nightmare FramesLos Angeles to rekindle our love-hate relationship.

Postmodern Adventures has released a new point-and click adventure. This is a lighthearted, playful tribute to Hollywood horror. The story touches on everything from classic Hammer Film productions to the art of old school prosthetics. There’s the city itself, my former home, a sprawling, sun-bleached character that needs no introduction. The pixelated images of scammy photographer studios, pawn shops, hit me like a punch in my gut. It reminds me of my past, old driving routes and the bone-dry sunsets I saw while waiting in traffic. Most of all, my gut recognizes exactly how the game’s protagonist, Alan Goldberg, is an impossibly LA-flavored piece of shit. It’s a lot.

Nightmare FramesIt is set during 1985’s action blockbuster surge that brought us Terminator, Rambo and other big-budget movies. Alan is a screenwriter, best known for schlocky horror flicks instead of “meaningful” dramas like Songs from HeavenThe only Oscar nominated prestige film he made was “The Killing of the Sick”. He is most known for his slasher flick, LunaticFans often compare the villain’s eponymous character to famous killers such as Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees.

All in all, Alan has it pretty good for a working movie writer — especially one who sees television writing as a lesser craft, even when directors like William Friedkin were doing incredibly gripping work on The Twilight Zone — but naturally, he wants more. Edward Keller offers him a very powerful favor for helping to locate a film that has been lost. This sets off a chain reaction of horror from Scream to Shadow of the Vampire.

Image by Postmodern Adventures

Here are some, but not all of the examples. Some (but not all!) contemporary point-and clicks show that the first hour can often be used as a gauge of whether the story has been built on sexist nostalgia from the Sierra and LucasArts eras. This pixelated nostalgia can cause sentimental blindness. For example: Voodoo detectiveThe game was created recently by two Americans, who have a cosmetic, superficial approach to voodoo. They don’t really care about the settings. Social media was flooded with retro developers showcasing the game’s animation and art. Jane Jensen’s 1993 explosion did not mean Jane Jensen is dead. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ Voodoo-led story (and I say this as a stalwart Jensen fan) doesn’t mean that developers can and should unquestioningly carry on the same tedious cultural appropriation today. It’s 2022, and point-and-click adventures can and should be so much more than regurgitations of questionable narrative decisions; there are some great contemporary indie devs out there whose work elevates the medium, like Wadjet Eye, Clifftop Games, the Geography of Robots collective, and Dead Idle (whose Laura Hunt did translation work on this game).

Nightmare Frames, a great example of point-and click that is clear in its intent, uses strategic doses nostalgia like an object with a sharp, bleeding edge. There’s the face reading of the game as one very average and mostly unlikeable man’s macabre journey into the occult, and (perhaps even more terrifyingly, for Alan) beyond LA into poor semi-rural America. But there’s more — a meta-layer of commentary on Hollywood itself as a remorseless machine that perpetuates idol worship, earthly desires, and the drama that goes along with it.

For every sharp bite of satire, there’s also an earnest glimpse into the heart of moviemaking, like the guys at Astounding FX churning out the fake corpses and demon prosthetics that remain etched in hearts and minds. There’s also a great send-up of Scientology in the form of the Church of the Mother Earth, a pay-as-you-go cult whose impressive headquarters resemble the Church of Scientology’s iconic sky-blue compound on Fountain Ave.

It’s beautiful to see everything that Alan loves about Hollywood, and everything he wants for himself, ground into a fine, sad dust. Alan is given a MacGuffin by the lost Keller film, which shows how he can get some of his soul back while enduring literal hell. This journey is made all the more fascinating because it comes from a Spanish developer — some of the most prescient explorations of American pop culture come from beyond its shores, thanks to the relentless tendrils of cultural imperialism that permeate the world. Growing up, Americana in all its myriad incarnations – from the glamor of New York and every cliche of “making it big” in LA, to placid visions of suburbia and John Hughes’ defining hand in 80s and 90s slice-of-life dramedies – was a panacea for many of us who lived between the ongoing cultural dichotomy of “east” and “west,” reminding us that movies offer the promise of a more interesting life. All of this adds an extra dimension to the aspirational nature of Alan’s trajectory: his hunger for wealth, fame, and legitimacy without confronting the material conditions of his glossy, vapid dream.

Nightmare Frames is a small but effective tool that pushes all these buttons with verve. These puzzles use tried and true ideas from point-and click playbook. For example, you can combine a pointy object with something sticky to get another object. They’re not hard, but this isn’t that kind of game. I found it difficult to expect more, especially in the outdoor scene. Cues suggested that I would be better able handle the police car, patrol car, or fence. Then again, adventure games are often characterized by opportunities for a skilled developer to continue the genre’s long legacy of trolling the player through humor, frustration-by-design, and breaking the fourth wall. That being said, I had a couple of minor frustrations over missed opportunities to do more with the environment and the narrative, like exploiting the townspeople to greater effect, or utilizing Keller’s monstrous legacy to play around with different types of puzzles beyond fetch quests.

Alan’s bastard screenwriter persona starts to erode once he hits the town of Serena, and here, the game switches gears from semi-satirical romp to a medley of classic horror tropes: a missing teenager,, a lone small-town cop, a creepy redneck who almost shoots you off the front porch, to name a few. Some tropes from the end of the game are too confusing (secret twins!). You lose sight of the main point. The dialogue was also a little patchy at times — there are some fantastically saucy one-liners and pithy descriptions, which makes it extra difficult to ignore the stiffer writing (possibly a translation issue?) that inadvertently stands out because it doesn’t flow as naturally as it does elsewhere.

Image by Postmodern Adventures

Still, I took more notes for Nightmare Frames than I have for games twice its size — a testament to how effective it is at mythmaking, and encouraging me to build up my own neurotic theories. I fixated on the meticulous character portraits and their cheeky resemblances to famous faces — there’s a Terence Stamp guy, a sort-of-David Cronenberg guy, and a guy who looks like Dom Deluise. When I saw a clip of the real thing, it was a delight. Night of the Living DeadAs I flipped through a handful of pulp stories in cheap magazines, I was entertained by a small black-and white TV set up in a local drugstore. There’s even an arcade console with a trivia game (there’s a music-themed easy mode that I nailed) to play, while listening to original synthwave by Stefano Rossi and other choice musicians that nail that hazy 80s feel like it was yesterday.

Alan returns from his journey to hell as a transformed man, just like most horror movies. There’s no particularly profound message lurking here, which is actually kind of nice after all the chaos. Some things just happen, especially in Hollywood. Los Angeles has been my home for many years. My only regret is that I left it. However, I have a deep, bittersweet attachment to the place where I grew up.

Nightmare Frames On June 16, the game was made available for Windows PC users. Postmodern Adventures gave us a pre-release downloading code. We reviewed the game on PC. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Here are some links to help you find. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.