Mary Skelter: Nightmares

It kept me engaged and having fun throughout, apart from when I was skipping dialogue trees as quickly as possible to preserve my own sanity. It's a great blobber despite a dull story, and was fun enough to warrant hitting the “skip” button several thousand times in order to get back into the action.

Mary Skelter: Nightmares has some really interesting features and an impressively dark atmosphere. While a lot of the mechanics within the dungeons will feel familiar to genre fans, the levels themselves are very well crafted. There's also a unique battle system to master and the random element of Nightmares chasing you down dark corridors will definitely get the adrenaline pumping.

A cool art aesthetic and interesting mechanics can't help this game from feeling like a letdown.

Mary Skelter: Nightmares varies nicely from your typical turn-based JRPG. With a darker atmosphere than most games, the art and music is really what defines it. If you can overlook some of the repetitive combat and dialogue, this game has a lot to offer and provides an overall great experience.

While it won't blow anyone away, Mary Skelter: Nightmares is a well put together, enjoyable experience and a worthy addition to any dungeon crawler RPG fan's collection.

Despite a few oddities, Mary Skelter: Nightmares is easily one of the better DRPGs on the Nintendo Switch, and it’s only half of the Mary Skelter 2 package.

Mary Skelter may not be the greatest note for me to end out on, but it does show what the Vita was good at, and that was allowing RPG developers to push out experimental new IPs with little risk, and in the case of Mary Skelter, it led to a full fledged mix of Remake/Sequel on the Switch. This wasn’t the final first person RPG released for the system, but still is a solid one, even if I feel some others were better.

It’s an improvement over Agarest Wars, but that isn’t enough to make a game of high quality.

Mary Skelter: Nightmares is definitely one of my favorite dungeon crawlers, whether it be characters, music, battle system, or tone/theme, I just had so much fun playing it the entire way through. With some seriously messed up looking bosses, handy warp points, and Hameln, Mary Skelter just had so much I enjoyed. I can tell you for certain that I'm eagerly anticipating the sequel that's been announced, and I hope you'll enjoy this game as much as I did.

Mary Skelter: Nightmares shows Compile Heart moving a little away from its otaku-pandering roots and more towards an orthodox standard of JRPG design – and despite being the studio's first attempt at trying a new style, it's surprising how much of it works.