Nightmare Frames reveals first pictures and story details

Written by Jack Allin — November 21, 2020 at 10:26

How far would you go to track down the the scariest movie ever made? Well, you'll have the chance to find out next year in indie developer José María Meléndez's upcoming point-and-click pixel art adventure, Nightmare Frames.

Players control a writer named Alan Goldberg, whose career has stalled ever since his first film script earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1979. Now stuck making "slasher B-movies," Alan seeks help from "The Fairy Godmother," who is no kindly mythical enchantress but rather Helen Westmore, a "multimillionaire who does as she pleases in Hollywood: whether it's raising some actor's career, saving endangered studios or granting virtually any wishes." The catch is, she always asks something in exchange. For Alan, that means finding the lost final film of Edward Keller, "director of the best horror movie of all time." 

The first commercial game by Meléndez, who previously worked as writer and designer for Alcachofa Soft on The Abbey before releasing a pair of freeware adventures (Urban Witch Story and Billy Masters Was Right) under the studio name Postmodern Adventures, Nightmare Frames is a traditional third-person point-and-click adventure that sends players through a variety of pixel art environments from "Hollywood of the eighties to a small haunted town." If the protagonist is to revive his flagging career, he must follow in the footsteps of Keller "through TV studios, special effects workshops, Z movie production companies and even dangerous cults." Eventually he'll end up in Serena, a small town with a tragic past where "strange phenomena are taking place, which may be related to the movie he is looking for."

There is no firm release date at this point, but we could be seeing Nightmare Frames launched for Windows PC sometime before the end of 2021.