Mary Skelter: Nightmares is a dungeon crawler JRPG for the PlayStation Vita. In it, you take control of Jack, who is in a world that has been taken over by living dungeons. Jack and his friend Alice managed to escape from jail. During the process, Alice discovers that she is a Blood Maiden, someone with the power to kill the monsters of the dungeon, known as Marchens. Jack isn’t completely useless either, as he has abilities unique only to him that can assist other Blood Maidens.
As Jack and Alice find themselves in the city, they are joined by other Blood Maidens. They eventually explore the dungeons and clear them. In the first few chapters, there is a lot of worldbuilding where we learn about the powers of the Blood Maidens. While they can kill Marchens, their blood will eventually send them crazy, into Blood Skelter mode. This is where Jack comes in, as he can somehow prevent the Blood Maidens from losing themselves this way.
The gameplay is a typical dungeon crawler, taking place in first person as you explore the dungeons. Given it is a Vita game, the graphics are not the greatest, but still decent. There are random encounters, as well as dungeon traps, which can be quite annoying. Given the first-person view where you are limited to four directions, it can be difficult to see more of the surroundings than what is right in front of you. It doesn’t help that the map only maps the current square that you’re on, rather than what you can see.
As you explore, there are things you can find such as treasure chests and levers that will open doors. A gimmick here are that Nightmares will appear. Upon which the map disappears, and you need to run away from them. If the Nightmares catch up, you can still try and run away or battle them, but that will only stall them as you cannot kill them unless certain requirements are met. It’s not as tense and urgent as it sounds, but it is also still somewhat annoying. They end up disrupting the flow of exploration, so it sounds like a good unique concept but ends up grating on your patience.
The battle system is a lot more normal though, given it is a turn-based system. You can have up to four characters, plus Jack, in your team. Jack only plays a support role, such as using items, guarding a character and some other special abilities. The Blood Maidens on the other hand are the offensive ones, able to attack and other special abilities. There is a simple weakness system, and constantly dealing damage will fill a gauge where the characters can go into Massacre mode, temporarily upping all their stats. The battle system at the end of the day isn’t innovative but it is serviceable.
The difficulty at first seems manageable, and the game allows you to save anywhere, at most times. The caveat being that you need to remember to save because if you die, you will have to reload your save. This can be very annoying and frustrating when you play long sessions and are just exploring and exploring, then you accidentally find yourself in a bad spot and lose hours of progress. This is especially true when there are massive difficulty spikes with the bosses. You can easily be defeating the enemies within the dungeon only to be annihilated by the dungeon boss. Once again, this can feel unfair, even for a dungeon crawler.
Due to the first-person view and fog effects, you cannot see that far ahead of you, and stuff to the left and right. Sometimes you cannot even tell if there is an event or another icon until you’re upon it. There are some annoying gimmicks and features of the dungeons, such as when the Nightmares randomly appear, and you cannot open the menu and thus cannot heal outside of battle. You may be forced into a loss situation which can be very frustrating to lose hours of progress. Other times there may be levers or environmental objects that you need to interact with to weaken the boss, but the game does not explain this well.
The story, despite having a decent start and a good concept, ends up being quite boring. The story to gameplay ratio is not great as the game is heavily geared towards exploration. You will be enjoying the exploration but then the story cutscenes ruin your flow. On the flipside, you tend to explore for too long without progressing the story, this is a hard thing to balance, and the game doesn’t do it well. It takes all the way to the end for real progression, and there is supposedly a big revelation but it kind of comes out of nowhere. It’s supposed to be a twist, but it falls flat.
Despite the developer and the design of the characters, this game isn’t as ecchi as you would expect. There’s an optional minigame that plays on this aspect, but it is easily ignored, and everything else doesn’t suggest it much. Despite the predictable gameplay loop of exploring the dungeon, defeating the boss, and progressing to the next chapter, it is still fun to play. The story takes around 30 hours to complete depending on how much of each dungeon you explore. The dungeons can be huge and take hours each. It can be upwards of 40 to 50 hours if you take your time. There are two endings, a good ending and a bad ending, with the postgame content being a humungous dungeon, with a tiny, tiny bit of plot.
Overall, Mary Skelter: Nightmares is a decent dungeon crawler. It can be brutally difficulty in the beginning but once you get more characters to put into your party, get access to more skills, and have a general idea of how the battel system works, you can easily wreck the normal enemies. Bosses are still tough and the unique aspect of bosses randomly appearing while you’re exploring with no way out can be annoying and pointless towards the end of the game. It’s still a fun enough game to play.
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