Frightmare Download (1989 Arcade action Game)

This is a platform-game, where you play as a man who's experiencing a horrible nightmare. And if you die in it, you die for real...

Your mission is to survive long enough to wake up. For every room you visit, another 6 minutes goes by, and at 8:12 the alarm clock will ring, and save your life.

Your secondary objective is to increase your dream-state. You start with a "bad dream", but by killing monsters, and collecting chalices, you can get much worse dreams, like "horrible dream" or "deadly vision". Your dream-state is displayed in text-form at the top of the screen, and does not affect the game in any other way.

This is a horror game, and you will face zombies, bats, ghosts, and other terrifying creatures. If they touch you, you lose one of your five lives. You can collect different items, like guns, crucifixes, clocks, and other stuff. Your inventory can hold up to three items at once.

You can kill some enemies with the gun, but many are immune to it. Crucifixes can freeze enemies, and clocks slows them down.

The game consists of a huge maze of interconnected rooms. It's easy to get lost, and the game is almost impossible to complete, even if you cheat. So this is for anyone who wants a big challenge.

Frightmare is an okay shooter first published by Cascade Games in 1987. This Accolade-published PC version dates from 1991, and ranks among one of the rarest PC games ever made. Unfortunately, rare doesn't necessarily mean good, and Frightmare is a good example. The gameplay remains the same as the Spectrum ZX original, except with an even more awful red-yellow-green CGA palette on the PC. Based on a very scary British horror film of the same name, in Frightmare you basically fight your way through one 2D level after another in this horror platformer that's reminiscent of Nightbreed, except not half as fun due to very repetitive levels and tedious gameplay. Disembodied heads and zombies don't really look scary in choppy, way-too-red graphics, and there is little to keep you interested for long. All in all, another waste of a good movie license.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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